reflective attitude and function, whether of naïve life, deliberate invention, or controlled scientific research, has risen through the medium of some such total objective situation. The abstract logician may tell us that sensations or impressions, or associated ideas, or bare physical things, or conventional symbols, are antecedent conditions. But such statements cannot be verified by reference to a single instance of thought in connection with actual practice or actual scientific research. Of course, by extreme mediation symbols may become conditions of evoking thought. They get to be objects in an active experience. But they are stimuli only in case their manipulation to form a new whole occasions resistance, and thus reciprocal tension. Symbols and their definitions develop to a point where dealing with them becomes itself an experience, having its own identity; just as the handling of commercial commodities, or arrangement of parts of an invention, is an individual experience. There is always as antecedent to thought an experience of some subject-matter of the physical or social world, or organized intellectual world, whose parts are actively at war with each other—so much so that they threaten to disrupt the entire experience, which accordingly for its own maintenance requires deliberate re-definition and re-relation of its tensional parts. This is the reconstructive process termed thinking: the reconstructive situation, with its parts in tension and in such movement toward each other as tends to a unified experience, is the thought-situation.
This at once suggests the subjective phase. The situation, the experience as such, is objective. There is an experience of the confused and conflicting tendencies. But just what in particular is objective, just what form the situation shall take as an organized harmonious whole, is unknown; that is the problem. It is the uncertainty as to the what of the experience together with the certainty that there is such an experience, that evokes the thought-function. Viewed from this standpoint of uncertainty, the situation as a whole is subjective. No particular content or reference can be asserted off-hand. Definite assertion is expressly reserved—it is to be the outcome of the procedure of reflective inquiry now undertaken. This holding off of contents from definitely asserted position, this viewing them as candidates for reform, is what we mean at this stage of the natural history of thought by the subjective.
We have followed Lotze through his tortuous course of inconsistencies. It is better, perhaps, to run the risk of vain repetition, than that of leaving the impression that these are mere self-contradictions. It is an idle task to expose contradictions save we realize them in relation to the fundamental assumption which breeds them. Lotze is bound to differentiate thought from its antecedents. He is intent to do this, however, through a preconception that marks off the thought-situation radically from its predecessor, through a difference that is complete, fixed, and absolute, or at large. It is a total contrast of thought as such to something else as such that he requires, not a contrast within experience of one phase of a process, one period of a rhythm, from others.
This complete and rigid difference Lotze finds in the difference between an experience which is mere existence or occurrence, and one which has to do with worth, truth, right relationship. Now things, objects, have already, implicitly at least, determinations of worth, of truth, reality, etc. The same is true of deeds, affections, etc., etc. Only states of feelings, bare impressions, etc., seem to fulfil the prerequisite of being given as existence, and yet without qualification as to worth, etc. Then the current of ideas offers itself, a ready-made stream of events, of existences, which can be characterized as wholly innocent of reflective determination, and as the natural predecessor of thought.
But this stream of existences is no sooner there than its total incapacity to officiate as material condition and cue of thought appears. It is about as relevant as are changes that may be happening on the other side of the moon. So, one by one, the whole series of determinations of value or worth already traced are introduced into the very make-up, the inner structure, of what was to be mere existence: viz., (1) value as determined by things of whose spatial and temporal relations the things are somehow representative; (2) hence, value in the shape of meaning—the idea as significant, possessed of quality, and not a mere event; (3) distinguished values of coincidence and coherence within the stream. All these kinds of value are explicitly asserted, as we have seen; underlying and running through them all is the recognition of the supreme value of a situation which is organized as a whole, yet conflicting in its inner constitution.
These contradictions all arise in the attempt to put thought's work, as concerned with value or validity over against experience as a mere antecedent happening, or occurrence. Since this contrast arises because of the deeper attempt to consider thought as an independent somewhat in general which yet, in our experience, is specifically dependent, the sole radical avoiding of the contradictions can be found in the endeavor to characterize thought as a specific mode of valuation in the evolution of significant experience, having its own specific occasion or demand, and its own specific place.
The nature of the organization and value that the antecedent conditions of the thought-function possess is too large a question here to enter upon in detail. Lotze himself suggests the answer. He speaks of the current of ideas, just as a current, supplying us with the "mass of well-grounded information which regulates daily life" (Vol. I, p. 4). It gives rise to "useful combinations," "correct expectations," "seasonable reactions" (Vol. I, p. 7). He speaks of it, indeed, as if it were just the ordinary world of naïve experience, the so-called empirical world, as distinct from the world as critically revised and rationalized in scientific and philosophic inquiry. The contradiction between this interpretation and that of a mere stream of psychical impressions is only another instance of the difficulty already discussed. But the phraseology suggests the type of value possessed by it. The unreflective world is a world of practical values; of ends and means, of their effective adaptations; of control and regulation of conduct in view of results. Even the most purely utilitarian of values are nevertheless values; not mere existences. But the world of uncritical experience is saved from reduction to just material uses and worths; for it is a world of social aims and means, involving at every turn the values of affection and attachment, of competition and co-operation. It has incorporate also in its own being the surprise of æsthetic values—the sudden joy of light, the gracious wonder of tone and form.
I do not mean that this holds in gross of the unreflective world of experience over against the critical thought-situation—such a contrast implies the very wholesale, at large, consideration of thought which I am striving to avoid. Doubtless many and many an act of thought has intervened in effecting the organization of our commonest practical-affectional-æsthetic region of values. I only mean to indicate that thought does take place in such a world; not after a world of bare existences lacking value-specifications; and that the more systematic reflection we call organized science, may, in some fair sense, be said to come after, but to come after affectional, artistic, and technological interests which have found realization and expression in building up a world of values.
Having entered so far upon a suggestion which cannot be followed out, I venture one other digression. The notion that value or significance as distinct from mere existentiality is the product of thought or reason, and that the source of Lotze's contradictions lies in the effort to find any situation prior or antecedent to thought, is a familiar one—it is even possible that my criticisms of Lotze have been interpreted by some readers in this sense.[13] This is the position frequently called neo-Hegelian (though, I think, with questionable accuracy), and has been developed by many writers in criticising Kant. This position and that taken in this chapter do indeed agree in certain general regards. They are at one in denial of the factuality and the possibility of developing fruitful reflection out of antecedent bare existence or mere events. They unite in denying that there is or can be any such thing as mere existence—phenomenon unqualified as respects meaning, whether such phenomenon be psychic or cosmic. They agree that reflective thought grows organically out of an experience which is already organized, and that it functions within such an organism. But they part company when a fundamental question is raised: Is all organized meaning the work of thought? Does it therefore follow that the organization out of which reflective thought grows is the work of thought of some other
