movements of planets, eclipses, etc., are cases in point.[15] The maintenance of a unified experience has become a problem, an end. It is no longer secure. But this involves such restatement of the conflicting elements as will enable them to take a place somewhere in the new experience; they must be disposed of somehow, and they can be disposed of finally only as they are provided for. That is, they cannot be simply denied or excluded or eliminated; they must be taken into the fold of the new experience; such introduction, on the other hand, clearly demands more or less modification or transformation on their part. The thought-situation is the conscious maintenance of the unity of experience, with a critical consideration of the claims of the various conflicting contents to a place within itself, and a deliberate final assignment of position.
The conflicting situation inevitably polarizes or dichotomizes itself. There is somewhat which is untouched in the contention of incompatibles. There is something which remains secure, unquestioned. On the other hand, there are elements which are rendered doubtful and precarious. This gives the framework of the general distribution of the field into "facts," the given, the presented, the Datum; and ideas, the ideal, the conceived, the Thought. For there is always something unquestioned in any problematic situation at any stage of its process,[16] even if it be only the fact of conflict or tension. For this is never mere tension at large. It is thoroughly qualified, or characteristically toned and colored, by the particular elements which are in strife. Hence it is this conflict, unique and irreplaceable. That it comes now means precisely that it has never come before; that it is now passed in review and some sort of a settlement reached, means that just this conflict will never recur. In a word, the conflict as such is immediately expressed, or felt, as of just this and no other sort, and this immediately apprehended quality is an irreducible datum. It is fact, even if all else be doubtful. As it is subjected to examination, it loses vagueness and assumes more definite form.
Only in very extreme cases, however, does the assured, unquestioned element reduce to as low terms as we have here imagined. Certain things come to stand forth as facts, no matter what else may be doubted. There are certain apparent diurnal changes of the sun; there is a certain annual course or track. There are certain nocturnal changes in the planets, and certain seasonal rhythmic paths. The significance of these may be doubted: Do they mean real change in the sun or in the earth? But change, and change of a certain definite and numerically determinate character is there. It is clear that such out-standing facts (ex-istences) constitute the data, the given or presented, of the thought-function.
It is obvious that this is only one correspondent, or status, in the total situation. With the consciousness of this as certain, as given to be reckoned with, goes the consciousness of uncertainty as to what it means—of how it is to be understood or interpreted. The facts qua presentation or existences are sure; qua meaning (position and relationship in an experience yet to be secured) they are doubtful. Yet doubt does not preclude memory or anticipation. Indeed, it is possible only through them. The memory of past experience makes sun-revolving-about-earth an object of attentive regard. The recollection of certain other experiences suggests the idea of earth-rotating-daily-on-axis and revolving-annually-about-sun. These contents are as much present as is the observation of change, but as respects worth, they are only possibilities. Accordingly, they are categorized or disposed of as just ideas, meanings, thoughts, ways of conceiving, comprehending, interpreting facts.
Correspondence of reference here is as obvious as correlation of existence. In the logical process, the datum is not just real existence, and the idea mere psychical unreality. Both are modes of existence—one of given existence, the other of mental existence. And if the mental existence is in such cases regarded, from the standpoint of the unified experience aimed at, as having only possible value, the datum also is regarded, from the value standpoint, as incomplete and unassured. The very existence of the idea or meaning as separate is the partial, broken up, and hence objectively unreal (from the validity standpoint) character of the datum. Or, as we commonly put it, while the ideas are impressions, suggestions, guesses, theories, estimates, etc., the facts are crude, raw, unorganized, brute. They lack relationship, that is, assured place in the universe; they are deficient as to continuity. Mere change of apparent position of sun, which is absolutely unquestioned as datum, is a sheer abstraction from the standpoint either of the organized experience left behind, or of the reorganized experience which is the end—the objective. It is impossible as a persistent object in experience or reality. In other words, datum and ideatum are divisions of labor, co-operative instrumentalities, for economical dealing with the problem of the maintenance of the integrity of experience.
Once more, and briefly, both datum and ideatum may (and positively, veritably, do) break up, each for itself, into physical and psychical. In so far as the conviction gains ground that the earth revolves about the sun, the old fact is broken up into a new cosmic existence, and a new psychological condition—the recognition of a mental process in virtue of which movements of smaller bodies in relation to very remote larger bodies are interpreted in a reverse sense. We do not just eliminate as false the source of error in the old content. We reinterpret it as valid in its own place, viz., a case of the psychology of apperception, although invalid as a matter of cosmic structure. In other words, with increasing accuracy of determination of the given, there comes a distinction, for methodological purposes, between the quality or matter of the sense-experience and its form—the sense-perceiving, as itself a psychological fact, having its own place and laws or relations. Moreover, the old experience, that of sun-revolving, abides. But it is regarded as belonging to "me"—to this experiencing individual, rather than to the cosmic world. It is psychic.
Here, then, within the growth of the thought-situation and as a part of the process of determining specific truth under specific conditions, we get for the first time the clue to that distinction with which, as ready-made and prior to all thinking, Lotze started out, namely, the separation of the matter of impression from impression as psychical event. The separation which, taken at large, engenders an insoluble problem, appears within a particular reflective inquiry, as an inevitable differentiation of a scheme of values.
The same sort of thing occurs on the side of thought, or meaning. The meaning or idea which is growing in acceptance, which is gaining ground as meaning-of-datum, gets logical or intellectual or objective force; that which is losing standing, which is increasingly doubtful, gets qualified as just a notion, a fancy, a pre-judice, mis-conception—or finally just an error, a mental slip.
Evaluated as fanciful in validity it becomes mere image—subjective;[17] and finally a psychical existence. It is not eliminated, but receives a new reference or meaning. Thus the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is not one between meaning as such and datum as such. It is a specification that emerges, correspondently, in both datum and ideatum, as affairs of the direction of logical movement. That which is left behind in the evolution of accepted meaning is characterized as real, but only in a psychical sense; that which is moved toward is regarded as real in an objective, cosmic sense.[18]
The implication of the psychic and the logical within both the given presentation and the thought about it, appears in the continual shift to which logicians of Lotze's type are put. When the psychical is regarded as existence over against meaning as just ideal, reality seems to reside in the psychical; it is there anyhow, and meaning is just a curious attachment—curious because as mere meaning it is non-existent as event or state—and there seems to be nothing by which it can be even tied to the psychical state as its bearer or representative. But when the emphasis falls on thought as content, as significance, then the psychic event, the idea as image[19] (as distinct from idea as meaning) appears as an accidental but necessary evil, the unfortunate irrelevant medium through which our thinking has to go on.[20]
1. The data of thought.—When we turn to Lotze, we find that he makes a clear distinction between the presented
