 Essays in Experimental Logic by John Dewey. In the foregoing discussion, particularly in the last chapter, we were repeatedly led to recognize that thought has its own distinctive objects. At times, lots of gives way to the tendency to define thought entirely in terms of modes and forms of activity, which are exercised by it upon a strictly foreign material. The two motives continually push him in the other direction. One, thought has distinctive work to do, one which involves a qualitative transformation of at least the relationships of the presented matter. As fast as it accomplishes this work, the subject matter becomes somehow thought subject matter. As we have just seen, the data are progressively organized to meet thought's ideal of a complete whole. With its members interconnected according to a determining principle, such progressive organization throws backward doubt upon the assumption of the original total irrelevancy of the data and thought forms to each other. Two, a like mode of operates from the side of the subject matter. As merely foreign and external, it is too heterogenous to lend itself to thought's exercise and influence. The idea, as we saw in the first chapter, is the convenient medium through which lots of passes from the purely heterogenous, psychical impression or event, which is totally irrelevant to thought's purpose in working, over to a state of affairs which can reward thought. Idea as meaning forms the bridge from the brute factuality of the psychical impression to the coherent value of thought's own content. We have, in this chapter, to consider the question of the idea or content of thought from two points of view. First, the possibility of such a content, its consistency with lots of fundamental premises. Secondly, its objective character, its validity and test. One, the question of the possibility of a specific content of thought is the question of the nature of the idea as meaning. Meaning is the characteristic object of thought. We have, thus far, left unquestioned lots of continual assumption of meaning as a sort of thought unit, the building stone of thought's construction. In his treatment of meaning, lots of contradictions regarding the antecedents, data and content of thought, reach their full conclusion. He expressly makes meaning to be the product of thought's activity, and also the unreflective material out of which thoughts' operations grow. This contradiction has been worked out in accurate and complete detail by Professor Jones. He summarizes it as follows. No other way was left to him, lotsa, except this of first attributing all to sense, and afterwards attributing all to thought. And finally, of attributing it to thought only because it was already in its material. This seesaw is essential to his theory. The elements of knowledge, as he describes them, can subsist only by the alternate robbery of each other. We have already seen how strenuously lotsa insists upon the fact that the given subject matter of thought is to be regarded wholly as the work of a physical mechanism without any action of thought. But lotsa also states that if the products of the physical mechanism are to admit of combination in the definite form of a thought, they each require some previous shaping to make them into logical building stones and to convert them from impressions into ideas. Nothing is really more familiar to us than this first operation of thought. The only reason why we usually overlook it is that in the language which we inherit, it is already carried out. And it seems, therefore, to belong to the self-evident presuppositions of thought, not to its own specific work. And again, judgments can consist of nothing but combinations of ideas which are no longer mere impressions. Every such idea must have undergone at least the simple formation mentioned above. Such ideas are, lotsa goes on to urge, already rudimentary concepts. That is to say, logical determinations. The obviousness of the logical contradiction of attributing to a preliminary specific work of thought exactly the condition of affairs, which is elsewhere explicitly attributed to a psychical mechanism prior to any thought activity, should not blind us to its import and relative necessity. The impression, it will be recalled, is a mere state of our own consciousness, a mood of ourselves. As such, it has simple de facto relations as an event to other similar events. But reflective thought is concerned with the relationship of a content or matter to other contents. Hence, the impression must have a matter before it can come at all within the sphere of thought's exercise. How shall it secure this? Why, by a preliminary activity of thought, which objectifies the impression? Blue as a mere sensuous irritation or feeling is given equality. The meaning blue, blueness, the sense impression, is objectified. It is presented no longer as a condition which we undergo, but as something which has its being and its meaning in itself, and which continues to be what it is, and to mean what it means, whether we are conscious of it or not. It is easy to see here the necessary beginning of that activity, which we above appropriated to thought as such. It has not yet got so far as converting coexistence into coherence. It is first to perform the previous task of investing each single impression with an independent validity, without which the latter opposition of their real coherence to mere coexistence could not be made in any intelligible sense. This objection, which converts a sensitive state into a sensible matter to which the sensitive state is referred, also gives this matter position, a certain typical character. It is not objectified in a merely general way, but is given a specific sort of objectivity. Of these sorts of objectivity, there are three mentioned. That of substantive content, that of an attached dependent content, and that of an active relationship connecting the various contents with each other. In short, we have the types of meaning embodied in language in the form of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. It is through this preliminary formative activity of thought that reflective or logical thought has presented to it a world of meanings, ranged in an order of relative independence and dependence, and arranged as elements in a complex of meanings whose various constituent parts mutually influence one another's meanings. As usual, lots of mediate the contradiction between material constituted by thought and the same material just presented to thought by a further position so disparate to each, that taken in connection with each by turns, it seems to bridge the gulf. After describing the prior constitutive work of thought as above, he goes on to discuss a second phase of thought which is intermediary between this and the third phase, this reflective thought proper. This second activity is that of arranging experienced quails in series and groups, thus describing a sort of universal or common somewhat to various instances, as already described. On one hand, it is clearly stated that this second phase of thought's activity is in reality the same as the first phase, since all objectification involves positing, since positing involves distinction of one matter from others, and since this involves placing it in a series or group in which each is measurably marked off as to its degree in nature of its diversity from each other. We are told that we are only considering a purely inseparable operation of thought from two different sides. First, as the effect which objectifying thought has upon the matter as said over against the feeling subject. Secondly, the effect which this objectification has upon the matter in relation to other matters. Afterward, however, these two operations are declared to be radically different in type and nature. The first is determinant and formative. It gives ideas the shape without which the logical spirit could not accept them. The way it dictates its own laws to its object matter. The second activity of thought is rather passive and receptive. It simply recognizes what is already there. Thought can make no difference where it finds none already in the matter of impressions. The first universal, as we saw, can only be experienced in immediate sensation. It is no product of thought, but something that thought finds already in existence. The obviousness of this further contradiction is paralleled only by its inevitableness. Thought is in the air, is arbitrary and wild in dealing with meanings, unless it gets its start and cue from actual experience. Hence the necessity of insisting upon thoughts activity as just recognizing the contents already given. But on the other hand, prior to the work of thought there is to lots of no content or meaning. It requires a work of thought to detach anything from the flux of sense irritations and invest it with a meaning of its own. This dilemma is inevitable to any writer who declines to consider as correlative the nature of thought activity and thought content from the standpoint of their generating conditions in the movement of experience. Viewed from such a standpoint, the principle of solution is clear enough. As we have already seen, the internal dissension of an experience leads to detaching certain factors previously integrated in the concrete experience as aspects of its own qualitative coloring and to relegating them for the time being, pending integration into further immediate qualities of a reconstituted experience into a world of bare meanings, a sphere qualified as ideal throughout. These meanings then become the tools of thought in interpreting the data. Just as the sense qualities which define the presented situation are the immediate matter for thought, the two as mutually referred are content. That is the datum and the meaning as reciprocally qualified by each other constitute the objective of thought. To reach this unification is thought's objective or goal. Every successive cross-section of reflective inquiry presents what may be taken for granted as the outcome of previous thinking and as determinant of further reflective procedure. Taken as defining the point reached in the thought function and serving as constituent unit in further thought, it is content or logical object. Lot's instinct is sure in identifying and setting over against each other the material given to thought and the content which is thought's own building-stone. His contradictions arise simply from the fact that his absolute non-historic method does not permit him to interpret this joint identity and distinction in a working and hence relative sense. Two, the question of how the existence of meanings or thought contents is to be understood merges imperceptibly into the question of the real objectivity or validity of such contents. The distinction for Lot's is the now familiar one. So far as his logic compels him to insist that these matters are the possession and product of thought. Since thought is an independent activity, the ideas are merely ideas. There is no test of objectivity beyond the thoroughly unsatisfactory and formal one of their own mutual consistency. In reaction from this, Lot's is thrown back upon the idea of these contents as the original matter given in the impressions themselves. Here there seems to be an objective or external test by which the reality of thought's operations may be tried. A given idea is verified or found false according to its measure of correspondence with the matter of experience as such. But now we are no better off. The original independence and heterogeneity of impressions and of thought is so great that there is no way to compare the results of the latter with the former. We cannot compare or contrast distinctions of worth with bare differences of factual existence. The standard or test of objectivity is so thoroughly external that by original definition it is wholly outside the realm of thought. How can thought compare meanings with existences? Or again, the given material of experience apart from thought is precisely the relatively chaotic and unorganized. It even reduces itself to a mere sequence of psychological events. What senses there in directing us to compare the highest results of scientific inquiry with the bare sequence of our own states of feeling? Or even with the original data whose fragmentary and uncertain character was the exact motive for entering upon scientific inquiry? How can the former in any sense give a check or test the value of the latter? This is professedly to test the validity of a system of meanings by comparison with that whose defects call forth the construction of the system of meanings. Our subsequent inquiry simply consists in tracing some of the phases of the characteristic seesaw from one to the other of the two horns of the now familiar dilemma. Either thought is separate from the matter of experience and then its validity is wholly its own private business or else the objective results of thought are already in the antecedent material and then thought is either unnecessary or else has no way of checking its own performances. One, Lotso assumes as we have seen a certain independent validity in each meaning or qualified content taken in and of itself. Blue has certain meanings in and of itself and it is an object for consciousness as such, not merely its state or mood. After the original sense irritation through which it was mediated has entirely disappeared, it persists as a valid meaning. Moreover, it is an object or content of thought for others as well. Thus it has a double mark of validity in the comparison of one part of my own experience with another and in the comparison of my experience as a whole with that of others. Here we have a sort of validity which does not raise at all the question of metaphysical reality. Lotso thus seems to have escaped from the necessity of employing as check or test for the validity of ideas any reference to a real outside the sphere of thought itself. Such terms as conjunction, franchise, constitution, algebraic zero, etc. claim to possess objective validity. Yet none of these professes to refer to a reality beyond thought. Generalizing this point of view, validity or objectivity of meaning means simply that which is identical for all consciousness. It is quite indifferent whether certain parts of the world of thought indicate something which has beside an independent reality outside of thinking minds or whether all that it contains exists only in the thoughts of those who think it but with equal validity for them all. So far it seems clear sailing. Difficulties however show themselves the moment we inquire what is meant by a self identical content for all thought. Is this to be taken in a static or in a dynamic way? That is to say does it express the fact that a given content or meaning is de facto presented to a consciousness of all like? Does this co-equal presence guarantee an objectivity? Or does validity attach to a given meaning or content in the sense that it directs and controls the further exercise of thinking and thus the formation of further new objects of knowledge? The former interpretation is alone consistent with Lotz's notion that the independent idea as such is invested with a certain validity or objectivity. It alone is consistent with his assertion that concepts precede judgments. It alone, that is to say, is consistent with the notion that reflective thinking has a sphere of ideas or meanings applied to it at the outset. But it is impossible to entertain this belief. The stimulus which, according to Lotz's goads thought on from ideas or concepts to judgments and inferences is in truth simply the lack of validity of objectivity in its original independent meanings or contents. A meaning as independent is precisely that which is not invested with validity but which is a mere idea, a notion, a fancy, at best a surmise which may turn out to be valid. And of course, this indicates possible reference, a standpoint to have its value determined by its further active use. Blue, as a mere detached floating meaning, an idea at large would not gain in validity simply by being entertained continuously in a given consciousness or by being made at one in the same time the persistent object of attentive regard by all human consciousnesses. If this were all that were required, the chimera, the centaur or any other subjective construction could easily gain validity. Christian science has made just this notion the basis of its philosophy. The simple fact is that in such illustrations as blue, franchise, conjunction, Lotza instinctively takes cases which are not mere independent and detached meanings but which involve reference to a region of experience to a region of mutually determining social activities. The conception that reference to a social activity does not involve the same sort of reference of a meaning beyond itself that is found in physical matters and hence may be taken quite innocent and free of the problem of reference to existence beyond meaning is one of the strangest that has ever found lodgement in human thinking. Either both physical and social reference or neither is logical. If neither, then it is because the meaning functions as it originates in a specific situation which carries with it its own tests. Lotza's conception is made possible only by unconsciously substituting the idea of an object as a content of thought for a large number of persons or a de facto somewhat for every consciousness for the genuine definition of object as a determinant and a scheme of activity. The former is consistent with Lotza's conception of thought but wholly indeterminate as to validity or intent. The latter is the test used experimentally in all concrete thinking but involves a radical transformation of all Lotza's assumptions. A given idea of the conjunction of the franchise or of blue is valid not because everybody happens to entertain it but because it expresses the factor of control or direction in a given movement of experience. The test of validity of idea is its functional or instrumental use in affecting the transition from a relatively conflicting experience to a relatively integrated one. If Lotza's view were correct, blue, valid once, would be valid always even when red or green were actually called for to fulfill specific conditions. This is to say validity really refers to rightfulness or adequacy of performance in an asserting of connection not to a meaning as contemplated in detachment. If we refer again to the fact that the genuine antecedent of thought is a situation which is disorganized in its structural elements, we can easily understand how certain contents may be detached and held apart as meanings or references actual or possible. We can understand how such detached contents may be of use in affecting a review of the entire experience and as affording standpoints and methods of a reconstruction which will maintain the integrity of behavior. We can understand how validity of meaning is measured by reference to something which is not mere meaning by reference to something which lies beyond it as such is the reconstruction of an experience into which it enters as method of control. That paradox of ordinary experience in a scientific inquiry by which objectivity is given a like to matter of perception and to conceived relations to facts and to laws affords no peculiar difficulty because the test of objectivity is everywhere the same. Anything is objective insofar as through the medium of conflict it controls the movement of experience in its reconstructive transition. There is not first an object whether of sense perception or of conception which afterwards somehow exercises this controlling influence but the objective is any existence exercising the function of control. It may only control the act of inquiry. It may only set on foot doubt but this is direction of subsequent experience and insofar is a token of objectivity. It has to be reckoned with. So much for the thought content is meaning or having a validity of its own. It does not have it as isolated or given or static. It has it in its dynamic reference its use in determining further movement of experience. In other words the meaning having been selected and made up with reference to performing a certain office in the evolution of a unified experience can be tested in no other way than by discovering whether it does what it was intended to do or what it purports to do. Two lots of has to wrestle with this question of validity in a further respect what constitutes the objectivity of thinking as a total attitude activity or function according to his own statement. The meanings or valid ideas are after all only building stones for logical thought. Validity is thus not a property for them and its independent existences but of their mutual reference to each other. Thinking is the process of instituting these mutual references of building up the various scattered and independent building stones into the coherent system of thought. What is the validity of the various forms of thinking which find expression in the various types of judgment and in the various forms of inference. Categorical hypothetical disjunctive judgment inference by induction by analogy by mathematical equation classification theory of explanation all of these are processes of reflection by which connection in an organized whole is given to the fragmentary meanings with which thought sets out. What shall we say of the validity of such processes? On one point lots is quite clear these various logical acts do not really enter into the constitution of the valid world. The logical forms as such are maintained only in the process of thinking. The world of valid truth does not undergo a series of contortions and evolutions paralleling in any way the successive steps and missteps succession of tentative trials withdrawals and retracings which mark the course of our own thinking. Lots is explicit upon the point that only the thought content in which the process of thinking issues has objective validity. The act of thinking is purely and simply an inner movement of our own minds made necessary to us by reason of the constitution of our nature and of our place in the world. Here the problem of validity presents itself as the problem of the relation of the act of thinking to its own product. In his solution Lots uses two metaphors one deriving from building operations the other from traveling. The construction of a building requires of necessity certain tools and extraneous constructions stagings, scaffoldings, et cetera which are necessary to affect the final construction but which do not enter into the building as such. The activity has an instrumental though not a constitutive value as regards its product. Similarly, in order to get a view from the top of a mountain this view being the objective the traveler has to go through preliminary movements along devious courses. These again are antecedent prerequisites but do not constitute a portion of the attained view. The problem of thought is activity as distinct from thought as content opens up altogether too large a question to receive complete consideration at this point. Fortunately, however, the previous discussion enables us to narrow the point which is an issue just here. The question is whether the activity of thought is to be regarded as an independent function supervening entirely from without upon antecedence and directing from without upon data or whether it marks the phase of the transformation which the course of experience whether practical or artistic or socially affectional or whatever undergoes for the sake of its deliberate control. If it be the latter a thoroughly intelligent sense can be given to the proposition that the activity of thinking is instrumental and that its worth is found not in its own successive states as such but in the result in which it comes to conclusion. But the conception of thinking as an independent activity somehow occurring after an independent antecedent playing upon an independent subject matter and finally affecting an independent result presents us with just one miracle more. I do not question the strictly instrumental character of thinking. The problem lies not here but in the interpretation of the nature of the instrument. The difficulty with Lotz's position is that it forces us into the assumption of a means and an end which are simply and only external to each other and yet necessarily dependent upon each other a position which whenever found is thoroughly self contradictory. Lotz vibrates between the notion of thought as a tool in the external sense a mere scaffolding to a finished building in which it has no part nor lot and the notion of thought as an imminent tool as a scaffolding which is an integral part of the very operation of building and which is set up for the sake of building activity which is carried on effectively only with and through a scaffolding only in the former case can the scaffolding be considered as a mere tool. In the latter case the external scaffolding is not the instrumentality the actual tool is the action of erecting the building and this action involves the scaffolding as a constituent part of itself. The work of building is not set over against the completed building as mere means to an end. It is the end taken in process or historically longitudinally temporally viewed. This scaffolding more over is not an external means to the process of erecting but an organic member of it. It is no mere accident of language that building has a double sense meaning at once the process and the finished product. The outcome of thought is the thinking activity carried on to its own completion. The activity on the other hand is the outcome taken anywhere short of its own realization and thereby still going on. The only consideration which prevents easy and immediate acceptance of this view was the notion of thinking as something purely formal. It is strange that the empiricist does not see that his insistence upon a matter accidentally given to thought only strengthens the hands of the rationalist with his claim of thinking as an independent activity separate from the actual makeup of the affairs of experience. Thinking is a merely formal activity exercised upon certain sensations or images or objects sets forth an absolutely meaningless proposition. The psychological identification of thinking with the process of association is much nearer the truth. It is indeed on the way to the truth. We need only to recognize that association is of matters or meanings not of ideas as existences or events and that the type of association we call thinking differs from casual fancy or reverie by control in reference to an end to apprehend how completely thinking is a reconstructive movement of actual contents of experience in relation to each other. There is no miracle in the fact that tool and material are adapted to each other in the process of reaching a valid conclusion. Were they external in origin to each other and to the result the whole affair would indeed present an insoluble problem. So insoluble that if this were the true condition of affairs we never should even know that there was a problem. But in truth both material and tool have been secured and determined with reference to economy and efficiency and affecting the undesired the maintenance of a harmonious experience. The builder has discovered that his building means building tools and also building material. Each has been slowly evolved with reference to its fit employee in the entire function and this evolution has been checked at every point by reference to its own correspondent. The carpenter has not thought at large on his building and then constructed tools at large but has thought of his building in terms of the material which enters into it and through that medium has come to the consideration of the tools which are helpful. This is not a formal question but one of the place in relations of the matters actually entering into experience and they in turn determine the taking up of just those mental attitudes and the employing of just those intellectual operations which most effectively handle and organize the material. Thinking is adaptation to an end through the adjustment of particular objective contents. The thinker like the carpenter is at once stimulated and checked in every stage of his procedure by the particular situation which confronts him. A person is at the stage of wanting a new house. Well then his materials are available resources the price of labor the cost of building the state and needs of his family profession, etc. His tools are paper and pencil and compass or possibly the bank as a credit instrumentality etc. Again the work is beginning the foundations are laid this in turn determines its own specific materials and tools. Again the building is almost ready for occupancy the concrete process is that of taking away the scaffolding clearing up the grounds furnishing and decorating rooms etc. The specific operation again determines its own fit or relevant materials and tools. It defines the time and mode and manner of beginning and ceasing to use them. Logical theory will get along as well as does the practice of knowing when it sticks close by and observes the directions and checks inherent in each successive phase of the evolution of a cycle of experience. The problem in general of validity of the thinking process as distinct from the validity of this or that process arises only when thinking is isolated from its historic position and its material content. Three but lots is not yet done with the problem of validity even from his own standpoint. The ground shifts again under his feet. It is no longer a question of the validity of the idea or meaning with which thought is supposed to set out. It is no longer a question of the validity of the process of thinking in reference to its own product. It is the question of the validity of the product. Supposing, after all, that the final meaning or logical idea is thoroughly coherent and organized. Supposing it is an object for all consciousness as such, once more arises the question. What is the validity of even the most coherent and complete idea? A question which arises and will not down. We may reconstruct the notion of the chimera until it ceases to be an independent idea and becomes a part of the system of Greek mythology. Has it gained in validity in ceasing to be an independent myth and becoming an element in systematized myth? Myth it was and myth it remains. Mythology does not get validity by growing bigger. How do we know the same is not the case with the ideas which are the product of our most deliberate and extended scientific inquiry? The reference again to the content is the self-identical object of all consciousness proves nothing. The subject matter of hallucination does not gain validity in proportion to its social contagiousness. According to Lotza, the final product is, after all, still thought. Now, Lotza is committed once for all to the notion that thought in any form is directed by and at an outside reality. The ghost haunts him to the last. How, after all, does even the ideally perfect valid thought apply or refer to reality? Its genuine subject is still beyond itself. At the last, Lotza can dispose of this question only by regarding it as a metaphysical, not a logical problem. In other words, logically speaking, we are at the end just exactly where we were at the beginning in the sphere of ideas and of ideas only. Plus a consciousness of the necessity of referring these ideas to a reality which is beyond them, which is utterly inaccessible to them and which is out of reach of any influence which they may exercise and which transcends any possible comparison with the results. It is vain, says Lotza, to shrink from acknowledging the circle here involved. All we know of the external world depends upon the ideas of it which are within us. It is then this varied world of ideas within us which forms the sole material directly given to us. As it is the only material with which thought can end. To talk about knowing the external world through ideas which are merely within us is to talk of an inherent self-contradiction. There is no common ground in which the external world and our ideas can meet. In other words, the original separation between an independent thought material and an independent thought function and purpose lands us inevitably in the metaphysics of subjective idealism plus a belief in an unknown reality beyond. It is then an unknown reality beyond which, although unknowable, is yet taken as the ultimate test of the value of our ideas. At the end, after all our maneuvering, we are where we began with two separate disparates, one of meaning but no existence, the other of existence but no meaning. The other aspect of Lotza's contradiction which completes the circle is clear when we refer to his original propositions and recall that at the outset he was compelled to regard the origination and conjunctions of the impressions, the elements of ideas as themselves the effects exercised by a world of things already in existence. He sets up an independent world of thought and yet has to confess that both at its origin and at its termination, it points with absolute necessity to a world beyond itself. Only the stubborn refusal to take this initial and terminal reference of thought beyond itself as having a historic or temporal meaning indicating a particular place of generation and a particular point of fulfillment compels Lotza to give such objective reference a transcendental turn. When Lotza goes on to say that the measure of truth the particular parts of experience is found in asking whether when judged by thought they are in harmony with other parts of experience when he goes on to say that there is no sense in trying to compare the entire world of ideas with a reality which is non-existent accepting as it itself should become an idea. He lands where he might better have frankly commenced. He saves himself from utter skepticism only by claiming that the explicit assumption of skepticism the need of agreement of a ready-made idea as such with an extraneous ready-made material as such is meaningless. He defines correctly the work of thought is consisting in harmonizing the various portions of experience with each other. In this case the test of thought is the harmony or unity of experience actually affected. The test of validity of thought is beyond thought just as at the outer limit thought originates out of a situation which is not dependent upon thought. Interpret this before and beyond in a historic sense as an affair of the place occupied and role played by thinking as a function in experience in relation to other non-intellectual experiences of things and then the intermediate an instrumental character of thought its dependence upon unreflective antecedents for its existence and upon a consequent experience for its final test becomes significant and necessary. Taken at large apart from temporal development and control it plunges us in the depths of a hopelessly complicated and self-revolving metaphysic. End of Chapter 5. Essays in Experimental Logic by John Dewey. Chapter 6 Some Stages of Logical Thought This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The man in the street when asked what he thinks about a certain matter often replies that he does not think at all. He knows. The suggestion is that thinking is a case of active uncertainty set over against conviction or unquestioning assurance. When he adds that he does not have to think he knows. The further implication is that thinking when needed leads to knowledge that its purpose or object is to secure stable equilibrium. It is the purpose of this paper to show some of the main stages through which thinking understood in this way actually passes in its attempt to reach its most effective working. That is the maximum of reasonable certainty. I wish to show how a variety of modes of thinking easily recognizable in the progress of both the race and the individual may be identified and arranged as successive species of the relationship which doubting bears to assurance as various ratios so to speak which the vigor of doubting bears to mere acquiescence. The presumption is that the function of questioning is one which has continually grown in intensity and range that doubt is continually chased back and when cornered fights more desperately and thus clears the ground more thoroughly. Its successive stations or arrest constitute stages of thinking or to change the metaphor just in that degree that what has been accepted as fact the object of assurance loses stable equilibrium. The tension involved in the questioning attitude increases until a readjustment gives a new and less easily shaken equilibrium. The natural tendency of man is not to press home a doubt but to cut inquiry as short as possible. The practical man's impatience with theory has become a proverb. It expresses just the feeling that since the thinking process is of use only in substituting certainty for doubt any apparent prolongation of it is useless speculation wasting time and diverting the mind from important issues. To follow the line of least resistance is to cut short the stay in the sphere of doubts and suggestions and to make the speediest return into the world where one can act. The result, of course, is that difficulties are evaded or surmounted rather than really disposed of. Hence, in spite of the opposition of the would-be practical man the needs of practice of economy and of efficiency have themselves compelled a continual deepening of doubt and widening of the area of investigation. It is within this evolution that we have to find our stages of thinking. The initial stage is where the doubt is hardly endured but not entertained. It is no welcome guest but an intruder to be got rid of as speedily as possible. Development of alternative and competitive suggestions the forming of suppositions of ideas goes but a little way. The mind seizes upon the nearest or most convenient instrument of dismissing doubt and reattaining security. At the other end is the definitive and conscious search for problems and the development of elaborate and systematized methods of investigation, the industry and technique of science. Between these limits come processes which have started out upon the path of doubt and inquiry and then halted by the way. In the first stage of the journey beliefs are treated as something fixed and static. To those who are using them they are simply another kind of fact. They are used to settle doubts but the doubts are treated as arising quite outside the ideas themselves. Nothing is further from recognition than that the ideas themselves are open to doubt or need criticism and revision. Indeed, the one who uses static meanings is not even aware that they originated and have been elaborated for the sake of dealing with conflicts and problems. The ideas are just there and they may be used like any providential dispensation to help men out of the troubles into which they have fallen. Words are generally held responsible for this fixation of the idea for this substantiation of it into a kind of thing. A long line of critics have made us familiar with the invincible habit of supposing that wherever there is a name there is some reality corresponding to it. Of supposing that general and abstract words have their equivalent objects somewhere in Rerum Natura as have also singular and proper names. We know with what simplicity of self-confidence the English empirical school has accounted for the ontological speculation of Plato. Words tend to fix intellectual contents and give them a certain air of independence and individuality that some truth this here expressed there can be no question. Indeed, the attitude of mind of which we are speaking is well illustrated in the person who goes to the dictionary in order to settle some problem in morals, politics, or science who would end some discussion regarding a material point by learning what meaning is attached to terms by the dictionary as authority. The question is taken as lying outside of the sphere of science or intellectual inquiry since the meaning of the word, the idea is unquestionable and fixed. But this petrifying influence of words is after all only a superficial explanation. There must be some meaning present or the word could not fix it. There must be something which accounts for the disposition to use names as a medium of fossilization. There is in truth a certain real fact an existent reality behind both the word and the meaning it stands for. This reality is social usage. The person who consults a dictionary is getting an established fact when he turns there for the definition of a term. He finds the sense in which the word is currently used. Social customs are no less real than physical events. It is not possible to dispose of this fact of common usage by reference to mere convention or any other arbitrary device. A form of social usage is no more an express invention than any other social institution. It embodies the permanent attitude the habit taken towards certain recurring difficulties or problems and experience. Ideas or meanings fixed in terms show the scheme of values which the community uses in appraising matters that need consideration and which are indeterminate or unassured. They are held up as standards for all its members to follow. Here is the solution of the paradox. The fixed or static idea is a fact expressing an established social attitude a custom. It is not merely verbal because it denotes a force which operates as all customs do in controlling particular cases. But since it marks a mode of interpretation a scheme for assigning values a way of dealing with doubtful cases it falls within the sphere of ideas or coming to the life of the individual the fixed meaning represents not a state of consciousness fixed by a name but a recognition of a habitual way of belief a habit of understanding. We find an apt illustration of fixed ideas in the rules prevalent in primitive communities rules which minutely determine all acts in which the community as a whole is felt to have an interest. These rules are facts because they express customs and carry with them certain sanctions. Their meaning does not cease with judicial utterance. They are made valid at once in a practical way against anyone who departs from them. Yet as rules they are ideas for the express general ways of defining doubtful matters and experience and of reestablishing certainty. An individual may fail in acknowledgement of them and explicit references then necessary for one who has lost himself in the notion that ideas are psychical and subjective. I know of no better way to appreciate the significance of an idea than to consider that a social rule of judgment is nothing but a certain way of viewing or interpreting facts as such it is an idea. The point that is of special interest to us here however is that these ideas are taken as fixed and unquestionable and that the cases to which they are to apply are regarded as in themselves equally fixed. So far as concerns the attitude of those who employ this sort of ideas the doubt is simply as to what idea should be in a particular case. Even the Athenian Greeks for instance long kept up the form of inditing and trying a tree or implement through which some individual had been killed. There was a rule a fixed idea for dealing with all who offended against the community by destroying one of its citizens. The fact that an inanimate object a thing without intention nor volition offended was not a material circumstance. It made no difference in the case that is there was no doubt as to the nature of the fact it was as fixed as was the rule. With advance in the complexity of life however rules accumulate and discrimination that is a certain degree of inquiring and critical attitude enters in. Inquiry takes effect however in seeking among a collection of fixed ideas just the one to be used rather than in directing suspicion against any rule or idea as such or in an attempt to discover or constitute a new one. It is hardly necessary to refer to the development of cassuristry or to the multiplication of distinctions within dogmas or to the growth of ceremonial law in cumbrous detail to indicate what the outcome of this logical stage is likely to be. The essential thing is the doubt and inquiry are directed neither at the nature of the intrinsic fact itself nor at the value of the idea as such but simply at the manner in which one is attached to the other. Thinking falls outside both fact and idea and into the sphere of their external connection. It is still a fiction of judicial procedure that there is already in existence some custom or law under which every possible dispute that is every doubtful or unassured case falls and that the judge only declares which law is applicable in the particular case. This point of view has tremendously affected the theory of logic in its historic development. One of the chief perhaps the most important instrumentalities in developing and maintaining fixed ideas is the need of instruction and the way in which it is given. If ideas were called into play only when doubtful cases actually arise they could not help retaining a certain amount of vitality and flexibility but the community always instructs its new members as to its ways of disposing of these cases before they present themselves. Ideas are proffered in other words separated from present doubt and remote from application in order to escape future difficulties and the need of any thinking. In primitive communities this is the main purport of instruction and it remains such to a very considerable degree there is a pre-judgment rather than judgment proper when the community uses its resources to fix certain ideas in the mind that is certain ways of interpreting and regarding experience ideas are necessarily formulated so as to assume a rigid and independent form. They are doubly removed from the sphere of doubt. The attitude is uncritical and dogmatic in the extreme so much so that one might question whether it is to be properly designated as a stage of thinking. In this form ideas become the chief instruments of social conservation. Judicial decision and penal correction are restricted and ineffective methods of maintaining social institutions unchanged compared with instilling in advanced uniform ideas. Fixed modes of appraising all social questions and issues. These set ideas thus become the embodiment of the values which any group has realized and intends to perpetuate. The fixation supports them against dissipation through attrition of circumstance and against destruction through hostile attack. It would be interesting to follow out the ways in which such values are put under the protection of the gods and of religious rights or themselves erected into quasi-divinities as among the Romans. This, however, would hardly add anything to the logic of the discussion although it would indicate the importance attached to the fixation of ideas and the thorough going character of the means used to secure immobilization. The conserving value of the dogmatic attitude the point of view which takes ideas as fixed is not to be ignored. When society has no methods of science for protecting and perpetuating its achieved values there is practically no other resort than such crystallization. Moreover, with any possible scientific progress some equivalent of the fixed idea must remain. The nearer we get to the needs of action the greater absoluteness must attach to ideas. The necessities of action do not await our convenience. Emergencies continually present themselves where the fixity required for successful activation cannot be attained through the medium of investigation. The alternative to vacillation, confusion, and futility of action is importation to ideas of a positive and secured character not in strict logic belonging to them. It is this sort of determination that Hegel seems to have in mind in what he terms wearstend, the understanding. Apart from wearstend, he says, there is no fixity or accuracy in the region either of theory or practice. And again, wearstend sticks to fixity of characters and their distinctions from one another. It treats every meaning as having a subsistence of its own. In technical terminology, also, this is what is meant by positing ideas, hardening meanings. In recognizing, however, that fixation of intellectual content is a precondition of effective action, we must not overlook the modification that comes with the advance of thinking into more critical forms. At the outset, fixity is taken as the rightful possession of the ideas themselves. It belongs to them and is their essence. As the scientific spirit develops, we see that it is we who lend fixity to the ideas and that this loan is for a purpose to which the meaning of the ideas is accommodated. Fixity ceases to be a matter of intrinsic structure of ideas and becomes an affair of security in using them. Hence, the important thing is the way in which we fix the idea, the manner of the inquiry which results in definition. We take the idea as if it were fixed in order to secure the necessary stability of action. The crisis passed, the idea drops its borrowed investiture and reappears as surmise. When we substitute for ideas as uniform rules by which to decide doubtful cases, that making over of ideas which is requisite to make them fit, the quality of thought alters, we may fairly say that we have come into another stage. The idea is now regarded as essentially subject to change as a manufactured article needing to be made ready for use. To determine the conditions of this tradition lies beyond my purpose since I have in mind only a descriptive setting forth of the periods through which, as a matter of fact, thought has passed in the development of the inquiry function without raising the problem of its why and how. At this point, we shall not do more than note that as the scheduled stock of fixed ideas grows larger. Their application to specific questions becomes more difficult, prolonged and roundabout. There has to be a definite hunting for the specific idea which is appropriate. There has to be comparison of it with other ideas. This comes to involve a certain amount of mutual compromise and modification before selection is possible. The idea thus gets somewhat shaken. It has to be made over so that it may harmonize with other ideas possessing equal worth. Often, the very accumulation of fixed ideas commands this reconstruction. The dead weight of the material becomes so great that it cannot sustain itself without a readjustment of the center of gravity. Simplification and systemization are required, and these call for reflection. Critical cases come up in which the fixation of an idea or rule already in existence cannot be maintained. It is impossible to conceal that old ideas have to be radically modified before the situation can be dealt with. The friction of circumstances melts away their congealed fixity. Judgment becomes legislative. Seeking illustrations at large, we find this change typified in Hebrew history in the growing importance of the prophet over the judge. In the transition from a justification of conduct through bringing particular cases into conformity with existing laws, into that affected by personal right-mindedness, enabling the individual to see the law in each case for himself. Profoundly is this change conception of the relation between law and particular case affected moral life. It did not, among Simites, directly influence the logical sphere. With the Greeks, however, we find a continuous and marked departure from positive declaration of custom. We have assemblies meeting to discuss and dispute, and finally, upon the basis of consideration, thus brought to view, to decide. The man of counsel is set side by side with the man of deed. Odysseus was much experienced, not only because he knew the customs and ways of old, but even more because from the richness of his experience he could make the pregnant suggestion to meet the new crisis. It is hardly too much to say that it was the emphasis put by the Greek mind upon discussion, at first as preliminary to decision and afterward to legislation, which generated logical theory. Discussion is thus an apt name for this attitude of thought. It is bringing various beliefs together, shaking one against another and tearing down their rigidity. It is conversation of thoughts. It is dialogue, the mother of dialectic, in more than the etymological sense. No process is more recurrent in history than the transfer of operations carried on between two different persons into the arena of the individual's own consciousness. The discussion which at first took place by bringing ideas from different persons into contact, by introducing them into the form of competition and by subjecting them to critical comparison and selective decision, finally becomes a habit of the individual with himself. He becomes a miniature social assemblage in which pros and cons were brought into play struggling for the mastery for final conclusion. In some such way we can see reflection to be born. It is evident the discussion, the agitation of ideas, if judged from the standpoint of the older fixed ideas, is a destructive process. Ideas are not only shaken together and apart. They are so shaken in themselves that their whole validity becomes doubtful. Mind and not merely beliefs becomes uncertain. The attempt to harmonize different ideas means that in themselves they are discrepant. The search for a conclusion means that accepted ideas are only points of view and hence personal affairs. Needless to say it was the Sophists who emphasized and generalized this negative aspect, this presupposition of loss of assurance, of inconsistency, of subjectivity. They took it as applying not only to this, that and the other idea, but to ideas as ideas. Since ideas are no longer fixed contents, they are just expressions of an individual's way of thinking. Lacking inherent value, they merely express the interest that induced the individual to look this way rather than that. They are made by the individual's point of view and hence will be unmade if he can be led to change his point of view. Where all was fixity, now all is instability. Where all was certitude, nothing now exists, save opinion based on prejudice, interest, or arbitrary choice. The modern point of view, while condemning Sophistry, yet often agrees with it in limiting the reflective attitude as such to self-involation and self-conceit. From bacon down, the appeal is to observation, to attention to facts, to concern with the external world. The sole genuine guarantee of truth is taken to be appeal to facts. And thinking as such is something different. If reflection is not considered to be merely variable matter, it is considered to be at least an endless mulling over of things. It is the futile attempt to spin truth out of inner consciousness. It is introspection and theorizing and mere speculation. Such wholesale depreciation ignores the value inherent even in the most subjective reflection. For it takes the settled estate, which is proof that thought is not needed or that it has done its work, as if it supplied the standard for the occasions in which problems are hard upon us and doubt is rife. It takes the conditions which come about after and because we have thought to measure the conditions which call out thinking. Whenever we really need to reflect, we cannot appeal directly to the fact for the adequate reason that the stimulus to thinking arises just because facts have slipped away from us. The fallacy is neatly committed by Mill in his discussion of waywell's account of the need of mental conception or hypothesis in colegating facts. He insists that the conception is obtained from the facts in which it exists, is impressed upon us from without and also that it is the darkness and confusion of the facts that makes us want the conception in order to create, light and order. Reflection involves running over various ideas, sorting them out, comparing one with another, trying to get one which will unite in itself the strength of two, searching for new points of view, developing new suggestions, guessing, suggesting, selecting and rejecting. The greater the problem and the greater the shock of doubt and resultant confusion and uncertainty, the more prolonged and more necessary is the process of mere thinking. It is a more obvious case of biology than of physics. Of sociology than of chemistry. But it persists in established sciences. If we take even a mathematical proposition, not after it has been demonstrated and is thus capable of statement in adequate logical form, but while in process of discovery and proof, the operation of this subjective phase is manifest. So much so indeed that a distinguished modern mathematician has said that the paths which the mathematical inquirer traverses in any new field or more akin to those of the experimentalists and even to those of the poet and artist and to those of the Euclidean Geometer. What makes the essential difference between modern research and the reflection of, say, the Greeks is not the absence of mere thinking, but the presence of conditions for testing its results, the elaborate system of checks and balances found in the technique of modern experimentation. The thinking process does not now go on endlessly in terms of itself, but seeks outlet through reference to particular experiences. It is tested by this reference. Not, however, as if a theory could be tested by directly comparing it with facts, an obvious impossibility, but through use and facilitating commerce with facts. It is tested as glasses are tested. Things are looked at through the medium of specific meanings to see if thereby they assume a more orderly and clearer aspect if they are less blurred and obscure. The reaction of the Socratic School against the Sophistic may serve to illustrate the third stage of thinking. This movement was not interested in the de facto shaking of received ideas and a discrediting of all thinking. It was concerned, rather, with the virtual appeal to a common denominator involved in bringing different ideas into relation with one another. In their comparison and mutual modification, it saw evidence of the operation of a standard permanent meaning, passing judgment upon their conflict and revealing a common principle and standard of reference. It dealt not with the shaking and dissolution, but with a comprehensive permanent idea finally to emerge. Controversy and discussion among different individuals may result in extending doubt, manifesting the incoherency of accepted ideas and so throwing an individual into an attitude of distrust. But it also involves an appeal to a single thought to be accepted by both parties, thus putting an end to the dispute. This appeal to a higher court, this possibility of attaining a total and abiding intellectual object which should bring into relief the agreeing elements and contending thoughts and banish the incompatible factors animated the Socratic's search for the concept, the elaboration of the Platonic hierarchy of ideas in which the higher substantiate the lower and the Aristotelian exposition of the systematized methods by which general truths may be employed to prove propositions otherwise doubtful. At least this historic development will serve to illustrate what is involved in the transition from the second to the third stage, the transformation of discussion into reasoning, of subjective reflection into method of proof. Discussion, whether with ourselves or others, goes on by suggestion of clues as the uppermost object of interest opens away here or there. It is discursive and haphazard. This gives it the devious tenancy indicated in Plato's remark that it needs to be tied to the post of reason. It needs, that is, to have the ground or basis of its various component statements brought to consciousness in such a way as to define the exact value of each. The Socratic contention is the need of compelling the common denominator, the common subject underlying the diversity of views to exhibit itself. It alone gives a sure standard by which the claims of all assertions may be measured. Until this need is met, discussion is self-deceiving play with unjudged, unexamined matters which, confused and shifting, impose themselves upon us. We are familiar enough with the theory that the Socratic universal, the Platonic idea, was generated by an ignorant transformation of psychological abstractions into self-existent entities. To insist upon this as the key to the Socratic logic is mere caricature, the objectivity of the universal stood for the sense of something decisive and controlling in all reflection, which otherwise is just manipulation of personal prejudices. This sense is as active in modern science as it was in the Platonic dialectic. What Socrates felt was the opinionated, conceited quality of the terms used in the moral and political discussion of his day, as that contrasted with the subject matter which, if rightly grasped, would put an end to mere views and argumentations. By Aristotle's time, the interest was not so much in the existence of standards of decision in cases of doubt and dispute, as in the technique of their use. The judge was firmly seated on the bench. The parties in controversy recognized his jurisdiction, and their respective claims were submitted for adjudicature. The need was for rules of procedure by which the judge might in an obvious and impartial way bring the recognized universal or decisive law to bear upon particular matters. Hence the elaboration of those rules of evidence, those canons of demonstrative force which are the backbone of the Aristotelian logic. There was a code by which to decide upon the admissibility and value of proffered testimony, the rules of the syllogism. The figures and terms of the syllogism provided a scheme for deciding upon the exact bearing of every statement propounded, the plan of arrangement of major and minor primacies, of major, minor, and middle terms, furnished a manifesto of the exact procedure to be followed in determining the probative force of each element and reasoning. The judge knew what testimony to permit, when and how it should be introduced, how it could be impeached or have its competence lessened, and how the evidence was to be arranged so that a summary would also be an exhibit of its value in establishing a conclusion. This means that there now is a distinctive type of thinking marked off from mere discussion and reflection. It may be called either reasoning or proof. It is reasoning when we think of the regularity of the method we're getting at in employing the unquestioned grounds which give validity to other statements. It is proof, as regards the degree of logical desert, thereby measured out to such propositions. Proof is the acceptance or rejection justified through the reasoning. To quote from Mill, to give credence to a proposition as conclusion from something else is to reason in the most extensive sense of the term. We may say of a factor statement it is proved when we believe its truth by reason of some other fact or statement from which it is said to follow. Reasoning is marshalling a series of terms and propositions until we combine some doubtful fact firmly to an unquestioned, although remote, truth. It is the regular way in which a certain proposition is brought to bear on a precarious one, clothing the latter with something of the preemptory quality of the former. So far as we reach this result, so far as we can exhibit each step in the nexus and be sure it has been rightly performed. We have proof. But questions still face us. How about the truth upon which we fall back is guaranteeing the credibility of other statements? How about our major premise? Whence does it derive its guarantee? Cois custodies custodiet. We may, of course, in turns, absume it under some further major premise. But an infinite regress is impossible. And on this track, we are finally left hanging in the air. For practical purposes, the unquestioned principle may be taken as signifying mutual concession or agreement. It denotes that, as a matter of fact, its truth is not called in question by the parties concerned. This does admirably for setting arguments and controversies. It is a good way of amicably arranging matters among those already friends and fellow citizens. But scientifically, the widespread acceptance of an idea seems to testify to custom rather than to truth. Prejudice is strengthened in influence, but hardly in value, by the number who share it. Conceit is nonetheless self-conceit because it turns the head of many. Great interest was indeed afterward taken in the range of persons who hold truths in common. The Kuwait Simpor, Ubikua Omnibus, became of great importance. This, however, was not, in theory at least, because common agreement was supposed to constitute the major premise, but because it afforded confirmatory evidence to its self-evident and universal character. Hence the Aristotelian logic necessarily assumes certain first or fundamental truths, unquestioned and unquestionable, self-evident and self-evidencing, neither established nor modified by thought, but standing firm in their own right. This assumption was not as modern dealers in formal logic would sometimes have it, an external psychological or metaphysical attachment to the theory of reasoning to be omitted at will from logic as such. It was an essential factor of knowledge that there should be necessary propositions directly apprehended by reason and particular ones directly apprehended by sense. Reasoning could then join them. Without the truths, we have only the play of subjective, arbitrary, futile opinion. Judgment has not taken place, and assertion is without warrant. Hence the scheduling of first truths is an organic part of any reasoning which is occupied with securing demonstration, surety of assent or valid conviction. To deny the necessary place of ultimate truths in the logical system of Aristotle and his followers is to make them players in a game of social convention. It is to overlook, to invert the fact that they were sincerely concerned with the question of attaining the grounds and process of assurance. Hence they were obliged to assume primary intuitions, physical, moral and mathematical axioms in order to get the pegs of certainty to which to tie the bundles of otherwise contingent propositions. It would be going too far to claim that the regard for the authority of the church, of the fathers, of the scriptures, of ancient writers, of Aristotle himself, so characteristic of the Middle Ages was the direct outcome of this presupposition of truths fixed and unquestionable in themselves. But the logical connection is sure. The supply of absolute premises that Aristotle was able to proffer was scant. In his own generation and situation, this paucity made comparatively little difference. For to the mass of men the great bulk of values was still carried by custom, by religious belief and social institution. It was only in the comparatively small sphere of persons who had come under the philosophic influence that need for the logical mode of confirmation was felt. In the medieval period, however, all important beliefs required to be concentrated by some fixed principle, giving them stay in power, for they were contrary to obvious common sense and natural tradition. The situation was exactly such as to call into active use the Aristotelian scheme of thought. Authority supplemented the meagerness of the store of universals known by direct intuition. The Aristotelian plan of reasoning afforded the precise instrumentality through which the vague and chaotic details of life could be reduced to order by subjecting them to authoritative rules. It is not enough, however, to account for the ultimate major premises for the unconditioned grounds upon which credibility is assured. We have also to report where the other side comes from. Matters so uncertain in themselves as to require that they have their grounds supplied from outside. The answer in the Aristotelian scheme is an obvious one. It is the very nature of sense, of ordinary experience, to supply us with matters which in themselves are only contingent. There is a certain portion of the intellectual sphere that derived from experience which is infected throughout by its unworthy origin. It stands forever condemned to be merely empirical, particular, more or less accidental, inherently irrational. You cannot make gold from dross and the best that can be done for and with material of this sort is to bring it under the protection of truth which has warrant and weight in itself. We may now characterize this stage of thinking with reference to our original remark that different stages denote various degrees in the evolution of the doubt inquiry function as compared with the period of fixed ideas. Doubt is awake and inquiry is active but in itself it is rigidly limited. On one side it is bounded by fixed ultimate truths whose very nature is that they cannot be doubted which are not products of functions and inquiry but bases that investigation fortunately rests upon. In the other direction all matters of fact all empirical truths belong to a particular sphere or kind of existence and one intrinsically open to suspicion. The region is condemned in a wholesale way. In itself it exhales doubt. It cannot be reformed. It is to be shunned or if this is not possible to be escaped from by climbing up a ladder of intermediate terms until we lay hold on the universal. The very way in which doubt is objectified taken all in a piece marks its lack of vitality. It is arrested and cooped up in a particular place as with any doubtful character the less of its company the better. Uncertainty is not realized as a necessary instrument in compelling experienced matters to reveal their meanings and inherent order. This limitation upon inquiry settles the interpretation to be given thought at this stage. It is of necessity merely connective, merely mediating. It goes between the first principles themselves as to their validity outside the province of thought and the particulars of sense also as to their status and worth beyond the dominion of thought. Thinking is subsumption just placing a particular proposition under its universal. It is inclusion finding a place for some question matter within a region taken as more certain. It is use of general truths to afford support to things otherwise shaky an application that improves their standing while leaving their content unchanged. This means that thought has only a formal value. It is of service in exhibiting and arranging grounds upon which any particular proposition may be acquitted or condemned upon which anything already current may be assented to or upon which belief may reasonably be withheld. The metaphor of the law court is apt. There is assumed some matter to be either approved or disproved. As matter as content it is furnished. It is not to be found out. In the law court it is not a question of discovering what a man specifically is but simply if finding reasons for regarding him as guilty or innocent. There is no all around play of thought directed to the institution of something as fact but a question of whether grounds could be adduced justifying acceptance of some proposition already set forth. The significance of such an attitude comes into relief when we contrast it with what is done in the laboratory. In the laboratory there is no question of proving the things are just thus and so or that we must accept or reject a given statement. There is simply an interest in finding out what sort of things we are dealing with. Inequality or change that presents itself may be an object of investigation or may suggest a conclusion. For it is judged not by reference to pre-existent truths but by suggestiveness by what it may lead to. The mind is open to inquiry in any direction or we may illustrate the difference between the auditor and an actuary in an insurance company. One simply passes and rejects issues vouchers compares and balances statements already made out. The other investigates any one of the items of expense or receipt inquires how it comes to be what it is what facts as regards say length of life condition of money market activity of agents are involved and what further researches and activities are indicated. The illustrations of the laboratory and the expert remind us of another attitude of thought in which investigation attacks matters hitherto reserved. The growth, for example, of freedom of thought during the Renaissance was a revelation of the intrinsic momentum of the thought process itself. It was not a mere reaction from and against medieval scholasticism. It was the continued operation of a machinery which the scholastics had set a going. Doubt and inquiry were extended into the regions of particulars of matters of fact with the view of reconstituting them through discovery of their own structure no longer with the intention of leaving that unchanged while transforming their claim to credence by connecting them with some authoritative principles. Thought no longer found satisfaction in appraising them in a scale of values according to their nearness to or remoteness from fixed truths. Such work had been done to a nicety and it was futile to repeat it. Thinking must find a new outlet. It was out of employment and set to discover new lands. Galileo and Copernicus were travelers as much so as the crusader Marco Polo and Columbus. Hence the fourth stage covering what is popularly known as inductive and empirical science. Thought takes the form of inference instead of proof. Proof, as we have already seen, is accepting or rejecting a given proposition on the ground of its connection or lack of connection with some other proposition conceited or established. But inference does not terminate in any given proposition. It is after precisely those not given. It wants more facts, different facts. Thinking in the mode of inference insists upon terminating in an intellectual advance in a consciousness of truths hitherto escaping us. Our thinking must not now pass certain propositions after challenging them. Must not admit them because they exhibit certain credentials showing a right to be received into the upper circle of intellectual society. Thinking endeavors to compel things as they present themselves, to yield up something hitherto obscured or concealed. This advance and extension of knowledge through thinking seems to be well designed by the term inference. It does not certify what is otherwise doubtful, but goes from the known to the unknown. It aims at pushing out the frontiers of knowledge, not at marking those already attained with signposts. Its technique is not a scheme for assigning status to beliefs already possessed, but is a method for making friends with facts and ideas hitherto alien. Inference reaches out, fills in gaps. Its work is measured not by the patterns of standing at issues, but by the material increments of knowledge it yields. Inventio is more important than judicium, discovery than proof. With the development of empirical research, uncertainty or contingency is no longer regarded as infecting in a wholesale way an entire region, discrediting it, save as it can be brought under the protecting ages of universal truths as major premises. Uncertainty is now a matter of detail. It is the question whether the particular fact is really what it has been taken to be. It involves contrast, not of a fact as a fixed particular over against some fixed universal, but of the existing mode of apprehension with another possible better apprehension. From the standpoint of reasoning and proof, the intellectual field is absolutely measured out in advance. Certainty is located in one part, intellectual indeterminateness or uncertainty in another. But when thinking becomes research, when the doubt inquiry function comes to its own, the problem is just what is the fact. Hence the extreme interest in details as such in observing, collecting and comparing particular causes, in analysis of structure down to its constituent elements, interests in atoms, cells, and in all matter of arrangements in space and time. The microscope, telescope, and spectroscope, the scalpel and microtome, the chymograph and the camera are not mere material appendages to thinking. They are as integral parts of investigative thought as were Barbara, Calarent, etc. of the logic of reasoning. Facts must be discovered. And to accomplish this, apparent facts must be resolved into their elements. Things must be readjusted in order to be held free from intrusion of impertinent circumstances and misleading suggestion. Instrumentalities of extending and rectifying research are therefore of themselves organs of thinking. The specialization of the sciences, the almost daily birth of a new science, is a logical necessity, not a mere historical episode. Every phase of experience must be investigated. And each characteristic aspect presents its own peculiar problems, which demand therefore their own technique of investigation. The discovery of difficulties, the substitution of doubt for quiescent acceptance are more important than the sanctioning of belief through proof. Hence the importance of noting apparent exceptions, negative instances, extreme cases, anomalies. The interest is in the discrepant because that stimulates enquiry, not in the fixed universal, which would terminate it once for all. Hence the roaming over the earth and through the skies for new facts, which may be incompatible with old theories and which may suggest new points of view. To illustrate these matters in detail would be to write the history of every modern science. The interest in multiplying phenomenon and increasing the area of fact in developing new distinctions of quantity, structure and form is obviously characteristic of modern science. But we do not always heed its logical significance that it makes thinking to consist in the extension and control of contact with new material so as to lead regularly to the development of new experience. The elevation of the region of facts, the formerly condemned region of the inherently contingent and variable to something that invites and rewards enquiry defines the import, therefore, of the larger aspects of modern science. This spirit prides itself upon being positivistic. It deals with the observed and the observable. It will have not to do with ideas that cannot verify themselves by showing themselves in appropriate persona. It is not enough to present credentials from more sovereign truths. These are hardly acceptable, even as letters of introduction. Refutation of Newton's claim that he did not make hypotheses by pointing out that no one was busier in this direction than he and that scientific power is generally in direct ratio to ability to imagine possibilities is as easy as it is irrelevant. The hypotheses, the thoughts that Newton employed were of and about fact. They were for the sake of exacting and extending what can be apprehended. Instead of being sacrosan truths affording a redemption by grace to facts otherwise ambiguous, they were the articulating of ordinary facts, hence the notion of law changes. It is no longer something governing things and events from on high. It is the statement of their own order. Thus the exiling of occult forces and qualities is not so much a specific achievement as it is a demand of the changed attitude. When thinking consists in the detection and determination of observable detail, forces, forms, qualities at large are thrown out of employment. They are not so much proved non-existent as rendered nuggatory. Disuse breeds their degeneration. When the universal is but the order of the facts themselves, the mediating machinery disappears along with the essences. There is substituted for the hierarchical world in which each degree in the scale has its righteousness imputed from above, a world homogeneous in structure and in the scheme of its parts, the same in heaven, earth, and the utmost parts of the sea, the latter of values from the sub-lunary world with its irregular, extravagant and perfect motion up to the stellar universe, with itself returning perfect order corresponding to the middle terms of the older logic. The steps were graduated, ascending from the indeterminate unassured matter of self, up to the eternal, unquestioning truths of rational perception. But when interest is occupied in finding out what anything and everything is, any fact is just as good as its fellow. The observable world is a democracy. The difference which makes a fact what it is, is not an exclusive distinction, but a matter of position and quantity, an affair of locality and aggregation, traits which place all facts upon the same level, since all other observable facts also possess them and are, indeed, conjointly responsible for them. Laws are not edicts of a sovereign, binding the world of subjects otherwise lawless. They are the agreements, the compacts of facts themselves, or in the familiar language of mill, the common attributes, the resemblances. The emphasis of modern science upon control flows from the same source. Interest is in the new and extension in discovery. Inference is the advance into the unknown, the use of the established to win new worlds from the void. This requires an employee's regulation, that is, method in procedure. There cannot be a blind attack. A plan of campaign is needed. Hence the so-called practical applications of science, the Baconian knowledge is power, the Comtean, science's provision are not extra-logical addenda or super-erogatory benefits. They are intrinsic to the logical method itself, which is just the orderly way of approaching new experiences so as to grasp and hold them. The attitude of research is necessarily toward the future. The application of science to the practical affairs of life, as in the stationary engine or telephone, does not differ in principle from the determination of wavelengths of light through the experimental control of the laboratory. Science lives only in arranging for new contacts, new insights. The School of Kant agrees with that of Mill in asserting that judgment must, in order to be judgment, be synthetic or instructive, it must extend, inform, and purvey. When we recognize that this service of judgment in effecting growth of experience is not accidental, but that judgment means exactly the devising and using of suitable instrumentalities for this end, we remark that the so-called practical uses of science are only the further and freer play of the intrinsic movement of discovery itself. We begin with the assumption that thought is to be interpreted as a doubt inquiry function conducted for the purpose of arriving at that mental equilibrium known as assurance or knowledge. We assume that various stages of thinking could be marked out according to the amount of play which they give to doubt and the consequent sincerity with which thinking is identified with free inquiry. Modern scientific procedure, as just set forth, seems to define the ideal or limit of this process. It is inquiry emancipated, universalized, whose sole aim and criterion is discovery. Hence it marks the terminus of our description. It is idle to conceal from ourselves, however, that scientific procedure as a practical undertaking has not, as yet, reflected itself into any coherent and generally accepted theory of thinking, into any accepted doctrine of logic which is comparable to the Aristotelian. Kant's conviction that logic is a complete and settled science which with absolutely certain boundaries has gained nothing and lost nothing since Aristotle is startlingly contradicted by the existing state of discussion of logical doctrine. The simple fact of the case is that there are at least three rival theories on the ground, each claiming to furnish the sole proper interpretation of the actual procedure of thought. The Aristotelian logic is far from having withdrawn its claim. It still offers its framework as that into which the merely empirical results of observation and experimental inquiry must be fitted if they are to be regarded as really proved. Another school of logicians starting professedly from modern psychology discredits the whole traditional industry and reverses the Aristotelian theory of validity. It holds that only particular facts are self-supporting and that the authority allowed to general principles as derivative and secondhand. A third school of philosophy claims by analysis of science and experience to justify the conclusion that the universe itself is a construction of thought, giving evidence throughout of the pervasive and constitutive action of reason and holds consequently that our logical processes are simply the reading off or coming to consciousness of the inherently rational structure already possessed by the universe in virtue of the presence within it of this pervasive and constitutive action of thought. It thus denies both the claim of the traditional logic that matters of experienced fact are mere particulars having their rationality in an external ground and the claim of the empirical logic that thought is just a gymnastic by which we vault from one presented fact to another, remote in space and time. Which of the three doctrines is to be regarded as the legitimate exponent of the procedure of thought manifested in modern science? While the Aristotelian logic is willing to wave a claim to be regarded as expounder of the actual procedure, it still insists upon its right to be regarded as the sole ultimate umpire of the validity or proved character of the results reached. But the empirical and the transcendental logic stand face to face as rivals, each asserting that it alone tells the story of what science does and how it does it. With the consciousness of this conflict, my discussion in its present or descriptive phase must cease. Its close, however, suggests a further question. Insofar as we adopt the conception that thinking is itself a doubt inquiry process, must we not deny the claims of all of the three doctrines to be the articulate voicing of the methods of experimental science? Do they not all agree in setting up something fixed outside inquiry, and its limit? That the first principle in the empirical matters of fact of the Aristotelian logic fall outside the thinking process and condemn the latter to a purely external and go-between agency has been already sufficiently decanted upon. But it is also true that the fixed particulars, given facts or sensations, whatever the empirical logician starts from, are materials given ready-made to the thought process and externally limiting inquiry instead of being distinctions arising within and because of search for truth. Nor as regards this point is the transcendental in any position to throw stones at the empirical logic. Thought in itself is so far from a process of inquiry that it is taken to be the eternal fixed structure of the universe. Our thinking, involving doubt and investigation is due wholly to our finite imperfect character which condemns us to the task of merely imitating and reinstating thought in itself. Once and forever, complete, ready-made, fixed. The practical procedure and practical assumptions of modern experimental science, since they made thinking essentially and not merely accidentally a process of discovery, seem irreconcilable with both the empirical and transcendental interpretations. At all events, there is here sufficient discrepancy to give occasion for further search. Does not an account of thinking, basing itself on modern scientific procedure, demand a statement in which all the distinctions and terms of thought, judgment, concept, inference, subject, predicate, and copula of judgment, et cetera, add infinitum, shall be interpreted simply and entirely as distinctive functions or divisions of labor within the doubt inquiry process. End of chapter six. Essays in Experimental Logic by John Dewey. Chapter seven. The logical character of ideas. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Said John Stuart Mill. To draw inferences has been said to be the great business of life. It is the only occupation in which the mind never ceases to be engaged. If this be so, it seems a pity that Mill did not recognize that this business identifies what we mean when we say mind. If he had recognized this, he would have cast the weight of his immense influence not only against the conception that mind is a substance, but also against the conception that it is a collection of existential states or attributes without any substance in which to adhere. And he would thereby have done much to free logic from epistemological metaphysics. In any case, an account of intellectual operations and conditions from the standpoint of the role played and position occupied by them in the business of drawing inference is a different sort of thing from an account of them as having an existence per se. From treating them as making up some sort of existential material distinct from the things which figure in inference drawing. This latter type of treatment is that which underlies the psychology which itself has adopted uncritically the remnants of the metaphysics of soul substance, the idea of accidents without the substance. This assumption from metaphysical psychology, the assumption of consciousness as an existence stuff or existent process is then carried over into an examination of knowledge so as to make the theory of knowledge not logic an account of the ways in which valid inferences or conclusions from things to other things are made but epistemology. We have therefore the result so unfortunate for logic that logic is not free to go its own way but is comprised by the assumption that knowledge goes on not in terms of things. I use things in the broadest senses equaling race and covering affairs, concerns, acts as well as things in the narrower sense. But in terms of a relation between things and a peculiar existence made up of consciousness or else between things and functional operations of this existence. If it could be shown that psychology is essentially not a science of states of consciousness but of behavior conceived as a process of continuous readjustment then the undoubted facts which go by the name of sensation, perception, image, emotion, concept would be interpreted to mean peculiar i.e. specifically qualitative epochs, phases and crises in the scheme of behavior. The supposedly scientific basis for the belief that states of consciousness inherently define a separate type of existence that would be done away with. Inferential knowledge, knowledge involving reflection psychologically viewed would be assimilated to a certain mode of readaptation of functions involving shock and the need of control. Knowledge in the sense of direct non-reflective presence of things would be identified psychologically with relatively stable or completed adjustments. I cannot profess to speak for psychologists but it is an obvious characteristic of the contemporary status of psychology that one school, the so-called functional or dynamic, operates with nothing more than a conventional and perfunctory reference to states of consciousness while the orthodox school makes constant concessions to ideas of the behavior type. It introduces the conception of fatigue, practice and habituation. It makes its fundamental classifications on the basis of physiological distinctions, e.g. the centrally initiated and the peripherally initiated which from a biological standpoint are certainly distinctions of structures involved in the performance of acts. One of the aims of the studies in logical theory was to show on the negative or critical side that the type of logical theory which professedly starts its account of knowledge from mere states of consciousness is compelled at every crucial juncture to assume things and to define its so-called mental state in terms of things and on the positive side to show that logically considered such distinctions as sensation, image, et cetera mark instruments and crises in the development of controlled judgment i.e. of inferential conclusions. It was perhaps not surprising that this effort should have been criticized not in its own merits but on the assumption that this correspondence of the functional psychological and the logical points of view was intended in terms of the psychology which obtained in the critic's mind to wit the psychology based on the assumption of consciousness as a separate existence or process. These considerations suggest that before we can intelligently raise the question of the truth of ideas we must consider their status and judgment judgment being regarded as the typical expression of the inferential operation. One Do ideas present themselves except in situations which are doubtful and inquired into? Do they exist side by side with the facts when the facts are themselves known? Do they exist except when judgment is in suspense? Two Are ideas anything except the suggestions, conjectures, hypotheses, theories? I use an ascending scale of terms tentatively entertained during a suspended conclusion. Three Do they have any part to play in the conduct of inquiry? Do they serve to direct observation, collocate data, and guide experimentation? Or are they odious? Four If the ideas have a function in directing the reflective process expressed in judgment does success in performing the function that is in directing to a conclusion which is stable have anything to do with the logical worth or validity of the idea? Five And finally does validity have anything to do with truth? Does truth mean something inherently different from the fact that the conclusion of one judgment the known fact previously unknown in which judging terminates is itself applicable in further situations of doubt and inquiry and is judgment more than tentative save as it terminates in a known fact i.e. a fact present without the intermediary of reflection? When these questions I mean of course questions which are exemplified in these queries are answered we shall perhaps have gone as far as it is possible to go with reference to the logical character of ideas. The question may then recur as to whether the ideas of the epistemologists i.e. existences in a purely private stream of consciousness remain as something over and above not yet accounted for or whether they are perversions and misrepresentations of logical characters. I propose to give a brief dogmatic reply in the latter sense where and in so far as there are unquestioned objects there is no consciousness there are just things when there is uncertainty there are dubious suspected objects things hinted at guessed at such objects have a distinct status and it is the part of good sense to give them as occupying that status a distinct caption consciousness is a term often used for this purpose and I see no objection to that term provided it is recognized to mean such objects as a problematic plus the fact that in the problematic character they may be used as effectively as accredited objects to direct observations and experiments which finally relieve the doubtful features of the situation. Such objects may turn out to be valid or they may not but in any case they may be used they may be internally manipulated and develop the racialization into explicit statement of their implications they may be employed as standpoints for selecting and arranging data and as methods for conducting experiments in short they are not merely hypothetical they are working hypotheses. Meanwhile their aloofness from accredited objectivity may lead us to characterize them as merely ideas or even as mental states provided once more we mean by mental state just this logical status. We have examples of such ideas and symbols. A symbol, I take it, is always itself existentially a particular object. A word an algebraic sign is as much a concrete existence as is a horse, a fire engine or a fly spec. But its value resides in its representative character in its suggestive and directive force for operations that when performed lead us to non-symbolic objects which without symbolic operations would not be apprehended or at least would not be so easily apprehended. It is I think worth noting that the capacity A for regarding objects as mere symbols and B for employing symbols instrumentally furnishes the only safeguard against dogmatism i.e. uncritical acceptance of any suggestion that comes to us vividly and also that it furnishes the only basis for intelligently controlled experiments. I do not think however that we should have the tendency to regard ideas as private as personal if we stop short of this point. If we had only words or other symbols uttered by others or written or printed we might call them when an objective suspense mere ideas but we should hardly think of these ideas as our own. Such extra organic stimuli however are not adequate logical devices. They are too rigid too objective in their own existential status. Their meaning and character are too definitely fixed. For effective discovery we need things which are more easily manipulated which are more transitive more easily dropped and changed. Intra organic events adjustments within the organism that is adjustments of the organism considered not with reference to the environment but with reference to one another are much better suited to stand as representatives of genuinely dubious objects. An object which is really doubted is by its nature precarious and inchoate vague. What is a thing when it is not yet discovered and yet is tentatively entertained and tested? Ancient logic never got beyond the conception of an object whose logical place whose substantive position as a particular with reference to some universal was doubtful. It never got to the point where it could search for particulars which in themselves as particulars are doubtful. Hence it was a logic of proof of deduction not of inquiry discovery and of induction. It was hard up against its own dilemma. How can a man inquire for either he knows that for which he seeks and hence does not seek or he does not know in which case he cannot seek nor could he tell if he found. The individualistic movement of modern life detached as it were the individual and allowed personal i.e. intra-organic events to have transitively and temporally a worth of their own. These events are continuous with extra organic events in origin and eventual outcome but they may be considered in temporary displacement as uniquely existential. In this capacity they serve as a means for the elaboration of a delayed but more adequate response in a radically different direction. So treated they are tentative dubious but experimental anticipations of an object. They are subjective i.e. individualistic surrogates of public cosmic things which may be so manipulated and elaborated as to terminate in public things which without them would not exist as empirical objects. The recognition then of intra-organic events which are not merely effects or distorted refractions of cosmic objects but incoate future cosmic objects in process of experimental construction resolves to my mind the paradox of so-called subjective and private things that have objective and universal reference and that operates to lead to objective consequences which test their own value. When a man can say this color is not necessarily the color of the glass nor the picture nor even of an object reflected but is at least an event in my nervous system an event which I may refer to my organism till I get surety of other reference he is for the first time emancipated from the dogmatism of unquestioned reference and is set upon a path of experimental inquiry. I am not here concerned with trying to demonstrate that this is the correct mode of interpretation. I am only concerned with pointing out its radical difference from the view of a critic who holding to the two-world theory of existences which from the start are divided into the fixedly objective and the fixedly psychical interprets in terms of his own theory the view that the distinction between the objective and the subjective is a logical practical distinction. Whether the logical as against the ontological theory be true or false