Studies in Logical Theory.
by John Dewey.
PREFACE
This volume presents some results of the work done in the matter of logical theory in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Chicago in the first decade of its existence. The eleven Studies are the work of eight different hands, all, with the exception of the editor, having at some period held Fellowships in this University, Dr. Heidel in Greek, the others in Philosophy. Their names and present pursuits are indicated in the Table of Contents. The editor has occasionally, though rarely, added a footnote or phrase which might serve to connect one Study more closely with another. The pages in the discussion of Hypothesis, on Mill and Whewell, are by him. With these exceptions, each writer is individually and completely responsible for his own Study.
The various Studies present, the editor believes, about the relative amount of agreement and disagreement that is natural in view of the conditions of their origin. The various writers have been in contact with one another in Seminars and lecture courses in pursuit of the same topics, and have had to do with shaping one another"s views. There are several others, not represented in this volume, who have also partic.i.p.ated in the evolution of the point of view herein set forth, and to whom the writers acknowledge their indebtedness. The disagreements proceed from the diversity of interests with which the different writers approach the logical topic; and from the fact that the point of view in question is still (happily) developing and showing no signs of becoming a closed system.
If the Studies themselves do not give a fair notion of the nature and degree of the harmony in the different writers" methods, a preface is not likely to succeed in so doing. A few words may be in place, however, about a matter repeatedly touched upon, but nowhere consecutively elaborated--the more ultimate philosophical bearing of what is set forth. All agree, the editor takes the liberty of saying, that judgment is the central function of knowing, and hence affords the central problem of logic; that since the act of knowing is intimately and indissolubly connected with the like yet diverse functions of affection, appreciation, and practice, it only distorts results reached to treat knowing as a self-inclosed and self-explanatory whole--hence the intimate connections of logical theory with functional psychology; that since knowledge appears as a function within experience, and yet pa.s.ses judgment upon both the processes and contents of other functions, its work and aim must be distinctively reconstructive or transformatory; that since Reality must be defined in terms of experience, judgment appears accordingly as the medium through which the consciously effected evolution of Reality goes on; that there is no reasonable standard of truth (or of success of the knowing function) in general, except upon the postulate that Reality is thus dynamic or self-evolving, and, in particular, except through reference to the specific offices which knowing is called upon to perform in readjusting and expanding the means and ends of life. And all agree that this conception gives the only promising basis upon which the working methods of science, and the proper demands of the moral life, may co-operate. All this, doubtless, does not take us very far on the road to detailed conclusions, but it is better, perhaps, to get started in the right direction than to be so definite as to erect a dead-wall in the way of farther movement of thought.
In general, the obligations in logical matters of the writers are roughly commensurate with the direction of their criticisms. Upon the whole, most is due to those whose views are most sharply opposed. To Mill, Lotze, Bosanquet, and Bradley the writers then owe special indebtedness. The editor acknowledges personal indebtedness to his present colleagues, particularly to Mr. George H. Mead, in the Faculty of Philosophy, and to a former colleague, Dr. Alfred H. Lloyd, of the University of Michigan. For both inspiration and the forging of the tools with which the writers have worked there is a pre-eminent obligation on the part of all of us to William James, of Harvard University, who, we hope, will accept this acknowledgment and this book as unworthy tokens of a regard and an admiration that are coequal.
I
THOUGHT AND ITS SUBJECT-MATTER: THE GENERAL PROBLEM OF LOGICAL THEORY
No one doubts that thought, at least reflective, as distinct from what is sometimes called const.i.tutive, thought, is derivative and secondary.
It comes after something and out of something, and for the sake of something. No one doubts that the thinking of everyday practical life and of science is of this reflective type. We think about; we reflect over. If we ask what it is which is primary and radical to thought; if we ask what is the final objective for the sake of which thought intervenes; if we ask in what sense we are to understand thought as a derived procedure, we are plunging ourselves into the very heart of the logical problem: the relation of thought to its empirical antecedents and to its consequent, truth, and the relation of truth to reality.
Yet from the nave point of view no difficulty attaches to these questions. The antecedents of thought are our universe of life and love; of appreciation and struggle. We think about anything and everything: snow on the ground; the alternating clanks and thuds that rise from below; the relation of the Monroe Doctrine to the embroglio in Venezuela; the relation of art to industry; the poetic quality of a painting by Botticelli; the battle of Marathon; the economic interpretation of history; the proper definition of cause; the best method of reducing expenses; whether and how to renew the ties of a broken friendship; the interpretation of an equation in hydrodynamics; etc.
Through the madness of this miscellaneous citation there appears so much of method: anything--event, act, value, ideal, person, or place--may be an object of thought. Reflection busies itself alike with physical nature, the record of social achievement, and the endeavors of social aspiration. It is with reference to _such_ affairs that thought is derivative; it is with reference to them that it intervenes or mediates.
Taking some part of the universe of action, of affection, of social construction, under its special charge, and having busied itself therewith sufficiently to meet the special difficulty presented, thought releases that topic and enters upon further more direct experience.
Sticking for a moment to this nave standpoint, we recognize a certain rhythm of direct practice and derived theory; of primary construction and of secondary criticism; of living appreciation and of abstract description; of active endeavor and of pale reflection. We find that every more direct primary att.i.tude pa.s.ses upon occasion into its secondary deliberative and discursive counterpart. We find that when the latter has done its work it pa.s.ses away and pa.s.ses on. From the nave standpoint such rhythm is taken as a matter of course. There is no attempt to state either the nature of the occasion which demands the thinking att.i.tude, nor to formulate a theory of the standard by which is judged its success. No general theory is propounded as to the exact relationship between thinking and what antecedes and succeeds it. Much less do we ask how empirical circ.u.mstances can generate rationality of thought; nor how it is possible for reflection to lay claim to power of determining truth and thereby of constructing further reality.
If we were to ask the thinking of nave life to present, with a minimum of theoretical elaboration, its conception of its own practice, we should get an answer running not unlike this: Thinking is a kind of activity which we perform at specific need, just as at other need we engage in other sorts of activity: as converse with a friend; draw a plan for a house; take a walk; eat a dinner; purchase a suit of clothes; etc., etc. In general, its material is anything in the wide universe which seems to be relevant to this need--anything which may serve as a resource in defining the difficulty or in suggesting modes of dealing effectively with it. The measure of its success, the standard of its validity, is precisely the degree in which the thinking actually disposes of the difficulty and allows us to proceed with more direct modes of experiencing, that are forthwith possessed of more a.s.sured and deepened value.
If we inquire why the nave att.i.tude does not go on to elaborate these implications of its own practice into a systematic theory, the answer, on its own basis, is obvious. Thought arises in response to its own occasion. And this occasion is so exacting that there is time, as there is need, only to do the thinking which is needed in that occasion--not to reflect upon the thinking itself. Reflection follows so naturally upon its appropriate cue, its issue is so obvious, so practical, the entire relationship is so organic, that once grant the position that thought arises in reaction to specific demand, and there is not the particular type of thinking called logical theory because there is not the practical demand for reflection of that sort. Our attention is taken up with particular questions and specific answers. What we have to reckon with is not the problem of, How can I think _uberhaupt_? but, How shall I think right _here and now_? Not what is the test of thought at large, but what validates and confirms _this_ thought?
In conformity with this view, it follows that a generic account of our thinking behavior, the generic account termed logical theory, arises at historic periods in which the situation has lost the organic character above described. The general theory of reflection, as over against its concrete exercise, appears when occasions for reflection are so overwhelming and so mutually conflicting that specific adequate response in thought is blocked. Again, it shows itself when practical affairs are so multifarious, complicated, and remote from control that thinking is held off from successful pa.s.sage into them.
Anyhow (sticking to the nave standpoint), it is true that the stimulus to that particular form of reflective thinking termed logical theory is found when circ.u.mstances require the act of thinking and nevertheless impede clear and coherent thinking in detail; or when they occasion thought and then prevent the results of thinking from exercising directive influence upon the immediate concerns of life. Under these conditions we get such questions as the following: What is the relation of rational thought to crude or unreflective experience? What is the relation of thought to reality? What is the barrier which prevents reason from complete penetration into the world of truth? What is it that makes us live alternately in a concrete world of experience in which thought as such finds not satisfaction, and in a world of ordered thought which is yet only abstract and ideal?
It is not my intention here to pursue the line of historical inquiry thus suggested. Indeed, the point would not be mentioned did it not serve to fix attention upon the nature of the logical problem.
It is in dealing with this latter type of questions that logical theory has taken a turn which separates it widely from the theoretical implications of practical deliberation and of scientific research. The two latter, however much they differ from each other in detail, agree in a fundamental principle. They both a.s.sume that every reflective problem and operation arises with reference to some _specific_ situation, and has to subserve a _specific_ purpose dependent upon its own occasion.
They a.s.sume and observe distinct limits--limits from which and to which.
There is the limit of origin in the needs of the particular situation which evokes reflection. There is the limit of terminus in successful dealing with the particular problem presented--or in retiring, baffled, to take up some other question. The query that at once faces us regarding the nature of logical theory is whether reflection upon reflection shall recognize these limits, endeavoring to formulate them more exactly and to define their relationships to each other more adequately; or shall it abolish limits, do away with the matter of specific conditions and specific aims of thought, and discuss thought and its relation to empirical antecedents and rational consequents (truth) at large?
At first blush, it might seem as if the very nature of logical theory as generalization of the reflective process must of necessity disregard the matter of particular conditions and particular results as irrelevant.
How, the implication runs, could reflection become generalized save by elimination of details as irrelevant? Such a conception in fixing the central problem of logic fixes once for all its future career and material. The essential business of logic is henceforth to discuss the relation of thought as such to reality as such. It may, indeed, involve much psychological material, particularly in the discussion of the processes which antecede thinking and which call it out. It may involve much discussion of the concrete methods of investigation and verification employed in the various sciences. It may busily concern itself with the differentiation of various types and forms of thought--different modes of conceiving, various conformations of judgment, various types of inferential reasoning. But it concerns itself with any and all of these three fields, not on their own account or as ultimate, but as subsidiary to the main problem: the relation of thought as such, or at large, to reality as such, or at large. Some of the detailed considerations referred to may throw light upon the terms under which thought transacts its business with reality; upon, say, certain peculiar limitations it has to submit to as best it may. Other considerations throw light upon the ways in which thought gets at reality. Still other considerations throw light upon the forms which thought a.s.sumes in attacking and apprehending reality. But in the end all this is incidental. In the end the one problem holds: How do the specifications of thought as such hold good of reality as such? In fine, logic is supposed to grow out of the epistemological inquiry and to lead up to its solution.
From this point of view various aspects of logical theory are well stated by an author whom later on we shall consider in some detail.
Lotze[1] refers to "universal forms and principles of thought which hold good everywhere both in judging of reality and in weighing possibility, _irrespective of any difference in the objects_." This defines the business of _pure_ logic. This is clearly the question of thought as such--of thought at large or in general. Then we have the question "of how far the most complete structure of thought ... can claim to be an adequate account of that which we seem compelled to a.s.sume as the object and occasion of our ideas." This is clearly the question of the relation of thought at large to reality at large. It is epistemology. Then comes "applied logic," having to do with the actual employment of concrete forms of thought with reference to investigation of specific topics and subjects. This "applied" logic would, if the standpoint of practical deliberation and of scientific research were adopted, be the sole genuine logic. But the existence of thought _in itself_ having been agreed upon, we have in this "applied" logic only an incidental inquiry of how the particular resistances and oppositions which "pure" thought meets from particular matters may best be discounted. It is concerned with methods of investigation which obviate defects in the relationship of thought at large to reality at large, as these present themselves under the limitations of human experience. It deals merely with hindrances, and with devices for overcoming them; it is directed by considerations of utility. When we reflect that this field includes the entire procedure of practical deliberation and of concrete scientific research, we begin to realize something of the significance of the theory of logic which regards the limitations of specific origination and specific outcome as irrelevant to its main problem, which a.s.sumes an activity of thought "pure" or "in itself," that is, "irrespective of any difference in its objects."
This suggests, by contrast, the opposite mode of stating the problem of logical theory. Generalization of the nature of the reflective process certainly involves elimination of much of the specific material and contents of the thought-situations of daily life and of critical science. Quite compatible with this, however, is the notion that it seizes upon _certain_ specific conditions and factors, and aims to bring them to clear consciousness--not to abolish them. While eliminating the particular material of particular practical and scientific pursuits, (1) it may strive to hit upon the common denominator in the various situations which are antecedent or primary to thought and which evoke it; (2) it may attempt to show how typical features in the specific antecedents of thought call out to diverse typical modes of thought-reaction; (3) it may attempt to state the nature of the specific consequences in which thought fulfils its career.
(1) It does not eliminate dependence upon specific occasions as provocative of thought; but endeavors to define _what_ in the various situations const.i.tutes them thought-provoking. The specific occasion is not eliminated, but insisted upon and brought into the foreground.
Consequently psychological considerations are not subsidiary incidents, but of essential importance so far as they enable us to trace the generation of the thought-situation. (2) So from this point of view the various types and modes of conceiving, judging, and inference are treated, not as qualifications of thought per se or at large, but of thought engaged in its specific, most economic, effective response to its own particular occasion; they are adaptations for control of stimuli. The distinctions and cla.s.sifications that have been acc.u.mulated in "formal" logic are relevant data; but they demand interpretation from the standpoint of use as organs of adjustment to material antecedents and stimuli. (3) Finally the question of validity, or ultimate objective of thought, is relevant; but is such as a matter of the specific issue of the specific career of a thought-function. All the typical investigatory and verificatory procedures of the various sciences are inherently concerned as indicating the ways in which thought actually brings itself to its own successful fulfilment in dealing with various types of problems.
While the epistemological type of logic may, as we have seen, leave (under the name of applied logic), a subsidiary place open for the instrumental type, the type which deals with thinking as a specific procedure relative to a specific antecedent occasion and to a subsequent specific fulfilment, is not able to reciprocate the favor. From its point of view, an attempt to discuss the antecedents, data, forms, and objective of thought, apart from reference to particular position occupied, and particular part played in the growth of experience is to reach results which are not so much either true or false as they are radically meaningless--because they are considered apart from limits.
Its results are not only abstractions (for all theorizing ends in abstractions), but abstractions without possible reference or bearing.
From this point of view, the taking of something, whether that something be thinking activity, its empirical condition, or its objective goal, apart from the limits of a historic or developing situation, is the essence of _metaphysical_ procedure--in the sense of metaphysics which makes a gulf between it and science.
As the reader has doubtless antic.i.p.ated, it is the object of this chapter to present the problem and industry of reflective thought from this latter point of view. I recur again to the standpoint of nave experience, using the term in a sense wide enough to cover both practical procedure and concrete scientific research. I resume by saying that this point of view knows no fixed distinction between the empirical values of unreflective life and the most abstract process of rational thought. It knows no fixed gulf between the highest flight of theory and control of the details of practical construction and behavior. It pa.s.ses, according to the occasion and opportunity of the moment, from the att.i.tude of loving and struggling and doing to that of thinking and the reverse. Its contents or material shift their values back and forth from technological or utilitarian to aesthetic, ethic, or affectional. It utilizes data of perception or of discursive ideation as need calls, just as an inventor now utilizes heat, now mechanical strain, now electricity, according to the demands set by his aim. From this point of view, more definite logical import is attached to our earlier statements (p. 2) regarding the possibility of taking anything in the universe of experience as subject-matter of thought. Anything from past experience may be taken which appears to be an element in either the statement or the solution of the present problem. Thus we understand the coexistence without contradiction of an indeterminate possible field and a limited actual field. The undefined set of means becomes specific through reference to an end.
In all this, there is no difference of kind between the methods of science and those of the plain man. The difference is the greater control in science of the statement of the problem, and of the selection and use of relevant material, both sensible or ideational. The two are related to each other just as the hit-or-miss, trial-and-error inventions of uncivilized man stand to the deliberate and consecutively persistent efforts of a modern inventor to produce a certain complicated device for doing a comprehensive piece of work. Neither the plain man nor the scientific inquirer is aware, as he engages in his reflective activity, of any transition from one sphere of existence to another. He knows no two fixed worlds--reality on one side and mere subjective ideas on the other; he is aware of no gulf to cross. He a.s.sumes uninterrupted, free, and fluid pa.s.sage from ordinary experience to abstract thinking, from thought to fact, from things to theories and back again.
Observation pa.s.ses into development of hypothesis; deductive methods pa.s.s to use in description of the particular; inference pa.s.ses into action with no sense of difficulty save those found in the particular task in question. The fundamental a.s.sumption is _continuity_ in and of experience.
This does not mean that fact is confused with idea, or observed datum with voluntary hypothesis, theory with doing, any more than a traveler confuses land and water when he journeys from one to the other. It simply means that each is placed and used with reference to service rendered the other, and with reference to future use of the other.
Only the epistemological spectator is aware of the fact that the everyday man and the scientific man in this free and easy intercourse are rashly a.s.suming the right to glide over a cleft in the very structure of reality. This fact raises a query not favorable to the epistemologist. Why is it that the scientific man, who is constantly plying his venturous traffic of exchange of facts for ideas, of theories for laws, of real things for hypotheses, should be so wholly unaware of the radical and generic (as distinct from specific) difficulty of the undertakings in which he is engaged? We thus come afresh to our inquiry: Does not the epistemological logician unwittingly transfer the specific difficulty which always faces the scientific man--the difficulty in detail of correct and adequate translation back and forth of _this_ set of facts and _this_ group of ideas--into a totally different problem of the wholesale relation of thought at large with reality in general? If such be the case, it is clear that the very way in which the epistemological type of logic states the problem of thinking, in relation both to empirical antecedents and to objective truth, makes that problem insoluble. Working terms, terms which as working are flexible and historic, relative, are transformed into absolute, fixed, and predetermined forms of being.
We come a little closer to the problem when we recognize that every scientific inquiry pa.s.ses historically through at least four stages.
(_a_) The first of these stages is, if I may be allowed the bull, that in which scientific inquiry does not take place at all, because no problem or difficulty in the quality of the experience has presented itself to provoke reflection. We have only to cast our eye back from the existing status of any science, or back from the status of any particular topic in any science, to discover a time when no reflective or critical thinking busied itself with the matter--when the facts and relations were taken for granted and thus were lost and absorbed in the value which accrued from the experience. (_b_) After the dawning of the problem, there comes a period of occupation with relatively crude and unorganized facts--the hunting for, locating, and collecting of raw material. This is the empiric stage, which no existing science, however proud in its attained rationality, can disavow as its own progenitor.
(_c_) Then there is also a speculative stage: a period of guessing, of making hypotheses, of framing ideas which later on are labeled and condemned as only ideas. There is a period of distinction and cla.s.sification-making which later on is regarded as only mentally-gymnastic in character. And no science, however proud in its present security of experimental a.s.surance, can disavow a scholastic ancestor. (_d_) Finally, there comes a period of fruitful interaction between the mere ideas and the mere facts: a period when observation is determined by experimental conditions depending upon the use of certain guiding conceptions; when reflection is directed and checked at every point by the use of experimental data, and by the necessity of finding such form for itself as will enable it to serve as premise in a deduction leading to evolution of new meanings, and ultimately to experimental inquiry, which brings to light new facts. In the emerging of a more orderly and significant region of fact, and of a more coherent and self-luminous system of meaning, we have the natural limit of evolution of the logic of a given science.
But consider what has happened in this historic record. Una.n.a.lyzed experience has broken up into distinctions of facts and ideas; the factual side has been developed by indefinite and almost miscellaneous descriptions and c.u.mulative listings; the conceptual side has been developed by unchecked and speculative elaboration of definitions, cla.s.sifications, etc. There has been a relegation of accepted meanings to the limbo of mere ideas; there has been a pa.s.sage of some of the accepted facts into the region of mere hypothesis and opinion.
Conversely, there has been a continued issuing of ideas from the region of hypotheses and theories into that of facts, of accepted objective and meaningful contents. Out of a world of only _seeming_ facts, and of only _doubtful_ ideas, there emerges a universe continually growing in definiteness, order, and luminosity.
This progress, verified in every record of science, is an absolute monstrosity from the standpoint of the epistemology which a.s.sumes a thought in general, on one side, and a reality in general, on the other.
The reason that it does not present itself as such a monster and miracle to those actually concerned with it is because there is a certain _h.o.m.ogeneity_ or _continuity_ of reference and of use which controls all diversities in both the modes of existence specified and the grades of value a.s.signed. The distinction of thought and fact is treated in the growth of a science, or of any particular scientific problem, as an _induced_ and _intentional_ practical division of labor; as relative a.s.signments of position with reference to performance of a task; as deliberate distribution of forces at command for their more economic use. The interaction of bald fact and hypothetical idea into the outcome of a single world of scientific apprehension and comprehension is but the successful achieving of the aim on account of which the distinctions in question were inst.i.tuted.
Thus we come back to the problem of logical theory. To take the distinctions of thought and fact, etc., as ontological, as inherently fixed in the make-up of the structure of being, is to treat the actual development of scientific inquiry and scientific control as a mere subsidiary topic ultimately of only utilitarian worth. It is also to state the terms upon which thought and being transact business in a way so totally alien to the use made of these distinctions in concrete experience as to create a problem which can be discussed only in terms of itself--not in terms of the conduct of life--metaphysics again in the bad sense of that term. As against this, the problem of a logic which aligns itself with the origin and employ of reflective thought in everyday life and in critical science, is to follow the natural history of thinking as a life-process having its own generating antecedents and stimuli, its own states and career, and its own specific objective or limit.
This point of view makes it possible for logical theory to come to terms with psychology.[2] When logic is considered as having to do with the wholesale activity of thought per se, the question of the historic process by which this or that particular thought came to be, of how its object happens to present itself as sensation, or perception, or conception, is quite irrelevant. These things are mere temporal accidents. The psychologist (not lifting his gaze from the realm of the changeable) may find in them matters of interest. His whole industry is just with natural history--to trace series of psychical events as they mutually excite and inhibit one another. But the logician, we are told, has a deeper problem and an outlook of more unbounded horizon. He deals with the question of the eternal nature of thought and its eternal validity in relation to an eternal reality. He is concerned, not with genesis, but with value, not with a historic cycle, but with absolute distinctions and relations.
Still the query haunts us: Is this so in truth? Or has the logician of a certain type arbitrarily made it thus by taking his terms apart from reference to the specific occasions in which they arise and situations in which they function? If the latter, then the very denial of historic relationship and of the significance of historic method, is indicative only of the unreal character of his own abstraction. It means in effect that the affairs under consideration have been isolated from the conditions in which alone they have determinable meaning and a.s.signable worth. It is astonishing that, in the face of the advance of the evolutionary method in natural science, any logician can persist in the a.s.sertion of a rigid difference between the problem of origin and of nature; between genesis and a.n.a.lysis; between history and validity. Such a.s.sertion simply reiterates as final a distinction which grew up and had meaning in pre-evolutionary science. It a.s.serts against the most marked advance which scientific method has yet made a survival of a crude period of logical scientific procedure. We have no choice save either to conceive of thinking as a response to a specific stimulus, or else to regard it as something "in itself," having just in and of itself certain traits, elements, and laws. If we give up the last view, we must take the former.
The entire significance of the evolutionary method in biology and social history is that every distinct organ, structure, or formation, every grouping of cells or elements, has to be treated as an instrument of adjustment or adaptation to a particular environing situation. Its meaning, its character, its value, is known when, and only when, it is considered as an arrangement for meeting the conditions involved in some specific situation. This a.n.a.lysis of value is carried out in detail by tracing successive stages of development--by endeavoring to locate the particular situation in which each structure has its origin, and by tracing the successive modifications through which, in response to changing media, it has reached its present conformation.[3] To persist in condemning natural history from the standpoint of what natural history meant before it identified itself with an evolutionary process is not so much to exclude the natural-history standpoint from philosophic consideration as it is to evince ignorance of what it signifies.
Psychology as the natural history of the various att.i.tudes and structures through which experiencing pa.s.ses, as an account of the conditions under which this or that state emerges, and of the way in which it influences, by stimulation or inhibition, production of other states or conformations of consciousness, is indispensable to logical evaluation, the moment we treat logical theory as an account of thinking as a mode of adaptation to its own generating conditions, and judge its validity by reference to its efficiency in meeting its problems. The historical point of view describes the sequence; the normative follows the sequence to its conclusion, and then turns back and judges each historical step by viewing it in reference to its own outcome.[4]
In the course of changing experience we keep our balance as we move from situations of an affectional quality to those which are practical or appreciative or reflective, because we bear constantly in mind the context in which any particular distinction presents itself. As we submit each characteristic function and situation of experience to our gaze, we find it has a dual aspect. Wherever there is striving there are obstacles; wherever there is affection there are persons who are attached; wherever there is doing there is accomplishment; wherever there is appreciation there is value; wherever there is thinking there is material-in-question. We keep our footing as we move from one att.i.tude to another, from one characteristic quality to another, because we know the position occupied in the whole growth by the particular function in which we are engaged, and the position within the function of the particular element that engages us.
The distinction _between_ each att.i.tude and function and its predecessor and successor is serial, dynamic, operative. The distinctions _within_ any given operation or function are structural, contemporaneous, and distributive. Thinking follows, we will say, striving, and doing follows thinking. Each in the fulfilment of its own function inevitably calls out its successor. But coincident, simultaneous, and correspondent _within_ doing, is the distinction of doer and of deed; _within_ the function of thought, of thinking and material thought upon; within the function of striving, of obstacle of aim, of means and end. We keep our paths straight because we do not confuse the sequential, efficient, and functional relationship of types of experience with the contemporaneous, correlative, and structural distinctions of elements within a given function. In the seeming maze of endless confusion and unlimited shiftings, we find our way by the means of the stimulations and checks occurring within the process we are actually engaged with. We do not contrast or confuse a condition or state which is an element in the formation of one operation with the status or element which is one of the distributive terms of another function. If we do, we have at once an insoluble, because meaningless, problem upon our hands.
Now the epistemological logician deliberately shuts himself off from those cues and checks upon which the plain man instinctively relies, and which the scientific man deliberately searches for and adopts as const.i.tuting his technique. Consequently he is likely to set the sort of object or material which has place and significance only in one of the serial functional situations of experience, over against the active att.i.tude which describes part of the structural const.i.tution of another situation; or with equal lack of justification to a.s.similate terms characteristic of different stages to one another. He sets the agent, as he is found in the intimacy of love or appreciation, over against the externality of the fact, as that is defined within the reflective process. He takes the material which thought selects as its own basis for further procedure to be identical with the significant content which it secures for itself in the successful pursuit of its aim; and this in turn he regards as the material which was presented at the outset, and whose peculiarities were the express means of awakening thought. He identifies the final deposit of the thought-function with its own generating antecedent, and then disposes of the resulting surd by reference to some metaphysical consideration, which remains when logical inquiry, when science (as interpreted by him), has done its work. He does this, not because he prefers confusion to order, or error to truth, but simply because, when the chain of historic sequence is cut, the vessel of thought is afloat to veer upon a sea without soundings or moorings. There are but two alternatives: either there is an object "in itself" of thought "in itself," or else there are a series of values which vary with the varying functions to which they belong. If the latter, the only way these values can be defined is by discriminating the functions to which they belong. It is only conditions relative to a specific period or epoch of development in a cycle of experience which-enables one to tell what to do next, or to estimate the value and meaning of what is already done. And the epistemological logician, in choosing to take his question as one of thought which has its own form just as "thought," apart from the limits of the special work it has to do, has deprived himself of these supports and stays.