Part 34

See Philosophical Review, Vol. XI, pp. 117-20.

See statements regarding the psychological and the logical in The Child and the Curriculum, pp. 28, 29.

LOTZE, Logic (translation, Oxford, 1888), Vol. I, p. 2. For the preceding exposition see Vol. I, pp. 1, 2, 13, 14, 37, 38; also Microkosmus, Book V, chap. 4.

LOTZE, Logic, Vol. I, pp. 6, 7.

LOTZE, Logic (translation, Oxford, 1888), Vol. I, p. 25.

Ibid., Vol. I, p. 36.

Ibid.

Microkosmus, Book V, chap. 4.

Logic, Vol. II, p. 235; see the whole discussion, §§ 325 through 327.

The emphasis here is upon the term "existences," and in its plural form. Doubtless the distinction of some experiences as belonging to me, as mine in a peculiarly intimate way, from others as chiefly concerning other persons, or as having to do with things, is an early one. But this is a distinction of concern, of value. The distinction referred to above is that of making an object, or presentation, out of this felt type of value, and thereby breaking it up into distinct "events," etc., with their own laws of inner connection. This is the work of psychological analysis. Upon the whole matter of the psychical I am glad to refer to PROFESSOR GEORGE H. MEAD'S article entitled "The Definition of the Psychical," Vol. III, Part II, of The Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago.

We have a most acute and valuable criticism of Lotze from this point of view in PROFESSOR HENRY JONES, Philosophy of Lotze, 1895. My specific criticisms agree in the main with his, and I am glad to acknowledge my indebtedness. But I cannot agree in the belief that the business of thought is to qualify reality as such; its occupation appears to me to be determining the reconstruction of some aspect or portion of reality, and to fall within the course of reality itself; being, indeed, the characteristic medium of its activity. And I cannot agree that reality as such, with increasing fulness of knowledge, presents itself as a thought-system, though, as just indicated, I have no doubt that reality appears as thought-specifications or values, just as it does as affectional and æsthetic and the rest of them.

Bradley's criticisms of rationalistic idealism should have made the force of this point reasonably familiar.

The common statement that primitive man projects his own volitions, emotions, etc., into objects is but a back-handed way of expressing the truth that "objects," etc., have only gradually emerged from their life-matrix. Looking back, it is almost impossible to avoid the fallacy of supposing that somehow such objects were there first and were afterward emotionally appreciated.

Of course, this very element may be the precarious, the ideal, and possibly fanciful of some other situation. But it is to change the historic into the absolute to conclude that therefore everything is uncertain, all at once, or as such. This gives metaphysical skepticism as distinct from the working skepticism which is an inherent factor in all reflection and scientific inquiry.

But this is a slow progress within reflection. Plato, who was influential in bringing this general distinction to consciousness, still thought and wrote as if "image" were itself a queer sort of objective existence; it was only gradually that it was disposed of as psychical, or a phase of immediate experience.

Of course, this means that what is excluded and so left behind in the problem of determination of this objective content is regarded as psychical. With reference to other problems and aims this same psychic existence is initial, not survival. Released from its prior absorption in some unanalyzed experience it gains standing and momentum on its own account; e. g., the "personal equation" represents what is eliminated from a given astronomic time-determination as being purely subjective, or "source-of-error." But it is initiatory in reference to new modes of technique, re-readings of previous data--new considerations in psychology, even new socio-ethical judgments. Moreover, it remains a fact, and even a worthful fact, as a part of one's own "inner" experience, as an immediate psychical reality. That is to say, there is a region of personal experience (mainly emotive or affectional) already recognized as a sphere of value. The "source of error" is disposed of by making it a fact of this region. The recognition of falsity does not originate the psychic (p. 38, note).

Of course, this is a further reflective distinction. The plain man and the student do not determine the extraneous, irrelevant, and misleading matter as image in a psychological sense, but only as fanciful or fantastic. Only to the psychologist and for his purpose does it break up into image and meaning.

Bradley, more than any other writer, has seized upon this double antithesis, and used it first to condemn the logical as such, and then turned it around as the impartial condemnation of the psychical also. See Appearance and Reality. In chap. 15 he metes out condemnation to "thought" because it can never take in the psychical existence or reality which is present; in chap. 19, he passes similar judgment upon the "psychical" because it is brutally fragmentary. Other epistemological logicians have wrestled--or writhed--with this problem, but I believe Bradley's position is impregnable--from the standpoint of ready-made differences. When the antithesis is treated as part and lot of the process of defining the truth of a particular subject-matter, and thus as historic and relative, the case is quite otherwise.

Vol. I, pp. 28-34.

It is interesting to see how explicitly Lotze is compelled finally to differentiate two aspects in the antecedents of thoughts, one of which is necessary in order that there may be anything to call out thought (a lack, or problem); the other in order that when thought is evoked it may find data at hand--that is, material in shape to receive and respond to its exercise. "The manifold matter of ideas is brought before us, not only in the systematic order of its qualitative relationships, but in the rich variety of local and temporal combinations.... The combinations of heterogeneous ideas ... forms the problems, in connection with which the efforts of thought to reduce coexistence to coherence will subsequently be made. The homogeneous or similar ideas, on the other hand, give occasion to separate, to connect, and to count their repetitions." (Vol. I, pp. 33, 34; italics mine.) Without the heterogeneous variety of the local and temporal juxtapositions there would be nothing to excite thought. Without the systematic arrangement of quality there would be nothing to meet thought and reward it for its efforts. The homogeneity of qualitative relationships, in the pre-thought material, gives the tools or instruments by which thought is enabled successfully to tackle the heterogeneity of collocations and conjunctions also found in the same material! One would suppose that when Lotze reached this point he might have been led to suspect that in this remarkable adjustment of thought-stimuli, thought-material, and thought-tools to one another, he must after all be dealing, not with something prior to the thought-function, but with the necessary elements in and of the thought-situation.

Supra, p. 30.

For the identity of sensory experience with the point of greatest strain and stress in conflicting or tensional experience, see "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," Psychological Review, Vol. III, p. 57.

For the "accessory" character of thought, see LOTZE, Vol. I, pp. 7, 25-7, 61, etc.

BOSANQUET, Logic (Vol. I, pp. 30-34), and Jones (Philosophy of Lotze, 1895, chap. 4) have called attention to a curious inconsistency in Lotzes's treatment of judgment. On one hand, the statement is as given above. Judgment grows out of conception in making explicit the determining relation of universal to its own particular, implied in conception. But, on the other hand, judgment grows not out of conception at all, but out of the question of determining connection in change. Lotze's nominal reason for this latter view is that the conceptual world is purely static; since the actual world is one of change, we need to pass upon what really goes together (is causal) in the change as distinct from such as are merely coincident. But, as Jones clearly shows, it is also connected with the fact that, while Lotze nominally asserts that judgment grows out of conception, he treats conception as the result of judgment since the first view makes judgment a mere explication of the content of an idea, and hence merely expository or analytic (in the Kantian sense) and so of more than doubtful applicability to reality. The affair is too large to discuss here, and I will content myself with referring to the oscillation between conflicting contents, and gradation of sensory qualities already discussed (p. 56, note). It is judgment which grows out of the former, because judgment is the whole situation as such; conception is referable to the latter because it is one abstraction within the whole (the solution of possible meanings of the data) just as the datum is another. In truth, since the sensory datum is not absolute, but comes in a historical context, the qualities apprehended as constituting the datum simply define the locus of conflict in the entire situation. They are attributives of the contents-in-tension of the colliding things, not calm untroubled ultimates. On pp. 33 and 34 of Vol. I, Lotze recognizes (as we have just seen) that, as matter of fact, it is both sensory qualities in their systematic grading, or quantitative determinations (see Vol. I, p. 43, for the recognition of the necessary place of the quantitative in the true concept), and the "rich variety of local and temporal combinations," that provoke thought and supply it with material. But, as usual, he treats this simply as a historical accident, not as furnishing the key to the whole matter. In fine, while the heterogeneous collocations and successions constitute the problematic element that stimulates thought, quantitative determination of the sensory quality furnishes one of the two chief means through which thought deals with the problem. It is a reduction of the original colliding contents to a form in which the effort at redintegration gets maximum efficiency. The concept, as ideal meaning, is of course the other partner to the transaction. It is getting the various possible meanings-of-the-data into such shape as to make them most useful in construing the data. The bearing of this upon the subject and predicate of judgment cannot be discussed here.

See Vol. I, pp. 38, 59, 61, 105, 129, 197, for Lotze's treatment of these distinctions.

Vol. I, p. 36; see also Vol. II, pp. 290, 291.

Vol. II, p. 246; the same is reiterated in Vol. II, p. 250, where the question of origin is referred to as a corruption in logic. Certain psychical acts are necessary as "conditions and occasions" of logical operations, but the "deep gulf between psychical mechanism and thought remains unfilled."

Philosophy of Lotze, chap. 3, "Thought and the Preliminary Process of Experience."