[2] There are certain points of similarity between this doctrine and that of Holt regarding contradictions and that of Montague regarding "consciousness" as a case of potential energy. But the latter doctrine seems to me to suffer, first, from an isolation of the brain from the organism, which leads to ignoring the active doing, and, secondly, from an isolation of the "moment" of reduction of actual to potential energy. It appears as a curiously isolated and self-sufficient event, instead of as the focus of readjustment in an organized activity at the pivotal point of maximum "tension"—that is, of greatest inhibition in connection with greatest tendency to discharge. And while I think Holt is wholly right in connecting the possibility of error with objectively plural and conflicting forces, I should hardly regard it as linguistically expedient to call counterbalancing forces "contradictory." The counterbalancing forces of the vaulting do not seem to me contradictory in the arch. But if their presence led me to attempt to say "up" and "down" at the same time there would be contradiction. But even admitting that contradictory propositions are merely about forces which are contradictory—heating and cooling—it is still a long way to error. For propositions about such "contradictions" are obviously true propositions. It is only when we make that reaction to one factor which is appropriate to dealing with the other that there is error; and this can happen where there are no contradictory forces at all beyond the fact that the agent is pulled two incompatible and opposed ways at the same time.

[3] For emphasis I am here exaggerating by condensing into a single decisive act an operation which is continuously going on.

[4] I would remark in passing that a recognition that a thing may be continuous in one respect and discrete in another would obviate a good many difficulties.

[5] In effect, the fallacy is the same as that of an idealistic theory which holds that all objects are "really" associations of sensations.

[6] This statement is meant literally. The "sensations" of color, sound, etc., to which appeal is made in a scientific inquiry are nothing mental in structure or stuff; they are actual, extra-organic things analyzed down to what is so indubitably there that it may safely be taken as a basis of inference.

[7] A term is not of course a mere word; a mere word is non-sense, for a sound by itself is not a word at all. Nor is it a mere meaning, which is not even natural non-sense, being (if it be at all) supernatural or transcendental nonsense. "Terms" signify that certain absent existences are indicated by certain given existences, in the respect that they are abstracted and fixed for intellectual use by some physically convenient means, such as a sound or a muscular contraction of the vocal organs.

[8] This distinction of indication as existential and implication as conceptual or essential, I owe to Mr. Alfred Sidgwick. See his Fallacies, p. 50.

[9] James, Psychology, II, 665.

[10] I have even seen, in a criticism of the essays, the method of genesis opposed to the method of experimentation—as if experimentation were anything but the generation of some special object!

[11] Logic (translation, Oxford, 1888), I, 10, 11. Italics mine.

[12] See Philosophical Review, XI, 117-20.

[13] Lotze, Logic (translation, Oxford, 1888), I, 2. For the preceding exposition see I, 1, 2, 13, 14, 37, 38; also Microkosmus, Book V, chap. iv.

[14] Lotze, Logic, I, 6, 7.

[15] Lotze, Logic (translation, Oxford, 1888), I, 25.

[16] Ibid., 36.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Microkosmus, Book V, chap. iv.

[19] Logic, II, 235; see the whole discussion, §§ 325-327.

[20] 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 practical existence presents itself in its temporal course as thought-specifications, just as it does as affectional and aesthetic and the rest of them.

[21] This is but to say that the presentation of objects as specifically different things in experience is the work of reflection, and that the discrimination of something experienced from modes of experiencing is also the work of reflection. The latter statement is, of course, but a particular case of the first; for an act of experiencing is one object, among others, which may be discriminated out of the original experience. When so discriminated, it has exactly the same existential status as any other discriminated object; seeing and thing seen stand on the same level of existentiality. But primary experience is innocent of the discrimination of the what experienced and the how, or mode, of experiencing. We are not in it aware of the seeing, nor yet of objects as something seen. Any experience in all of its non-reflective phases is innocent of any discrimination of subject and object. It involves within itself what may be reflectively discriminated into objects located outside the organism and objects referred to the organism. [Note added in revision.]

[22] 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.

[23] 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 a phase of personal experiencing.

[24] I, 28-34.

[25] 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 ... form 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" (I, 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 his 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 structures and tools of the thought-situation.

[26] Supra, p. 113.

[27] 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, III, 57.

[28] For the "accessory" character of thought, see Lotze, I, 7, 25-27, 61, etc.

[29] Bosanquet (Logic, I, 30-34) and Jones (Philosophy of Lotze, 1895, chap. iv) have called attention to a curious inconsistency in Lotze'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. 144, 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 I, 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.

[30] See I, 38, 59, 61, 105, 129, 197, for Lotze's treatment of these distinctions.

[31] I, 36; see also II, 290, 291.

[32] II, 246; the same is reiterated in II, 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."

[33] Philosophy of Lotze, chap. iii, "Thought and the Preliminary Process of Experience."

[34] I, 38.

[35] I, 13; last italics mine.

[36] I, 14; italics mine.

[37] See I, 16-20. On p. 22 this work is declared to be not only the first but the most indispensable of all thought's operations.

[38] I, 26.

[39] I, 35.

[40] I, 36; see the strong statements already quoted, p. 112. What if this canon were applied in the first act of thought referred to above: the original objectification which transforms the mere state into an abiding quality or meaning? Suppose, that is, it were said that the first objectifying act cannot make a substantial (or attached) quale out of a mere state of feeling; it must find the distinction it makes there already! It is clear we should at once get a regressus ad infinitum. We here find Lotze face to face with this fundamental dilemma: thought either arbitrarily forces in its own distinctions, or else just repeats what is already there—is either falsifying or futile. This same contradiction, so far as it affects the impression, has already been discussed. See p. 114.

[41] I, 31.

[42] As we have already seen, the concept, the meaning as such, is always a factor or status in a reflective situation; it is always a predicate of judgment, in use in interpreting and developing the logical subject, or datum of perception.

[43] Royce, in his World and Individual, I, chaps. vi and vii, has criticized the conception of meaning as valid, but in a way which implies that there is a difference between validity and reality, in the sense that the meaning or content of the valid idea becomes real only when it is experienced in direct feeling. The foregoing implies, of course, a difference between validity and reality, but finds the test of validity in exercise of the function of direction or control to which the idea makes pretension or claim. The same point of view would profoundly modify Royce's interpretation of what he terms "inner" and "outer" meaning. See Moore, University of Chicago Decennial Publications, III, on "Existence, Meaning, and Reality."

[44] II, 257, 265, and in general Book III, chap. iv. It is significant that thought itself, appearing as an act of thinking over against its own content, is here treated as psychical rather than as logical. Consequently, as we see in the text, it gives him one more difficulty to wrestle with: how a process which is ex officio purely psychical and subjective can yet yield results which are valid in a logical, to say nothing of an ontological, sense.

[45] Lotze even goes so far in this connection as to say that the antithesis between our ideas and the objects to which they are directed is itself a part of the world of ideas (II, 192). Barring the phrase "world of ideas" (as against world of continuous experience), he need only have commenced at this point to have traveled straight and arrived somewhere. But it is absolutely impossible to hold both this view and that of the original independent existence of something given to and in thought and an independent existence of a thought-activity, thought-forms, and thought-contents.

[46] Logic, Book IV, chap. ii, § 2.

[47] Logic, Book II, chap. i, § 1. I have changed the order of the sentences quoted, and have omitted some phrases.

[48] This conception of "consciousness" as a sort of reduplicate world of things comes to us, I think, chiefly from Hume's conception that the "mind is nothing but a heap, a collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations."—Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, sec. 2. For the evolution of this sort of notion out of the immaterial substance notion, see Bush, "A Factor in the Genesis of Idealism," in the James Festschrift.

[49] See, for example, p. 113. "Thus that which is 'nothing but a state of our consciousness' turns out straightway to be a specifically determined objective fact in a system of facts," and, p. 147, "actual sensation is determined as an event in a world of events."

[50] When it is said that an idea is a "plan of action," it must be remembered that the term "plan of action" is a formal term. It throws no light upon what the action is with respect to which an idea is the plan. It may be chopping down a tree, finding a trail, or conducting a scientific research in mathematics, history, or chemistry.

[51] I owe this idea, both in its historical and in its logical aspects, to my former colleague, Professor Mead, of the University of Chicago.

[52] Studies in Logical Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1903.

[53] Mill's doctrine of the ambiguity of the copula (Logic, Book I, chap. IV, § 1) is an instance of one typical way of evading the problem. After insisting with proper force and clearness upon the objective character of our intellectual beliefs and propositions, viz., that when we say fire causes heat we mean actual phenomena, not our ideas of fire and heat (Book I, chap. II and chap. XI, § 1, and chap. V, § 1), he thinks to dispose of the whole problem of the "is" in judgment by saying that it is only a sign of affirmation (chap. I, § 2, and chap. IV, § 1). Of course it is. But unless the affirmation (the sign of thought) "agrees" or "corresponds with" the relations of the phenomena, what becomes of the doctrine of the objective import of propositions? How otherwise shall we maintain with Mill (and with common-sense and science) the difference between asserting "a fact of external nature" and "a fact in my mental history"?

[54] Studies in Philosophy and Psychology, article by Woodbridge on "The Problem of Consciousness," especially pp. 159-60.

[55] In other words, "ideas" is a term capable of assuming any definition which is logically appropriate—say, meaning. It need not have anything to do with the conception of little subjective entities or psychical stuffs.

[56] Of course, the monistic epistemologies have an advantage in the statement of the problem over the dualistic—they do not state it in terms which presuppose the impossibility of the solution.

[57] This view was originally advanced in the discussion of quite another problem than the one here discussed, viz., the problem of consciousness; and it may not be quite just to dissever it from that context. But as a formula for knowledge it has enough similarity with the one brought out in this paper to suggest further treatment; it is not intended that the results reached here shall apply to the problem of consciousness as such.

[58] I am indebted to Dr. Bush's article on "Knowledge and Perception," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. VI, p. 393, and to Professor Woodbridge's article on "Perception and Epistemology" in the James Memorial Volume, as well as to his paper on "Sensations," read at the 1910 meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Since my point of departure and aim are somewhat different, I make this general acknowledgment in lieu of more specific references.

[59] Plato's use of shadows, of reflections in the water, and other "images" or "imitations" to prove the presence in nature of non-being was, considering the state of physical science in his day, a much more sensible conclusion than the modern use of certain images as proof that the object in perception is a psychical content. Hobbes expressly treats all images as physical, as on the same plane as reflections in the water and echoes; the comparison is his.

[60] It is impossible, in this brief treatment, to forestall every misapprehension and objection. Yet to many the use of the term "seen" will appear to be an admission that a case of knowledge is involved. But is smelling a case of knowledge? Or (if the superstition persists as to smell) is gnawing or poking a case of knowledge? My point, of course, is that "seen" involves a relation to organic activity, not to a knower, or mind.

[61] This is the phase of the matter, of course, which the rationalistic or objective realist, the realist of the type of T. H. Green, emphasizes. Put in terms of systems, the difficulty is that in escaping the subjectivism latent in treating perception as a case of knowledge, the realist runs into the waiting arms of the objective idealist.

[62] Professor Perry says (The New Realism, p. 115): "Professor Dewey is mistaken in supposing that realism assumes 'the ubiquity of the knowledge-relation.' Realism does not argue from the 'ego-centric predicament,' i.e., from the bare presence of the knowledge-relation in all cases of knowledge." If the text has not made my point clear, it is probably too much to expect that a footnote will do so. But I have not accused the realist of arguing from the ego-centric predicament. I have said that if any realist holds that the sole and exclusive relation of the one who is knower to things is that of being their knower, then the realist cannot escape the impact of the predicament. But if the one who knows things also stands in other connections with them, then it is possible to make an intelligible contrast between things as known and things as loved or hated or appreciated, or seen or heard or whatever. The argument, it should be noted, stands in connection with that of the last section as to whether hearing a sound and seeing a color are of themselves (apart from the use made of them in inference) cases of knowledge. It is significant that Perry holds (New Realism, p. 150) that "sensing" is per se a case of knowing. Hence it must be in relation to a knower; it must fall within the "predicament," for "it makes the mind aware of a characteristic of the environment." That it is used (or may be used) to make us aware of some characteristic of the environment, I of course hold. To say that it is an awareness by the mind of a characteristic of the environment is at once to involve a philosopher immediately in the discussion of whether red qualities, or only certain vibrations, are "really" characteristics of the environment. Then, when the authority of physics is invoked in behalf of the latter proposition, the epistemologist (however realistic in his intention) is forced to consider color as a misapprehension of the environment, a case of error or illusion, while the idealist triumphantly flourishes it as a case of the transformative or constitutive efficacy of "mind" in knowing. But if the color is simply a natural event, and if "mind" does not enter except when color is made the basis of inference to some characteristic of the environment, then there is no predicament; and there is no problem of error save as a false inference is made. Moreover, since errors in inference are an undoubted fact, the principle that entities are not to be multiplied beyond need gives a prima facie superiority to any theory which connects all error with inference till adequate evidence to the contrary is produced.

[63] I shall pass over the terms "our own" so far as specific reference is concerned, but the method employed applies equally to them. Who are the "we," and what does "own" mean, and how is ownership established?

[64] Contrast the statement: "When I speak of a fact, I do not mean one of the simple things of the world, I mean that a certain thing has a certain quality, or that certain things have a certain relation" (p. 51).

[65] In view of the assumption, shared by Mr. Russell, that there is such a thing as non-inferential knowledge, the conception that a thing offers evidence for itself needs analysis. Self-evidence is merely a convenient term for disguising the difference between the indubitably given and the believed in. Hypotheses, for example, are self-evident sometimes, that is, obviously present for just what they are, but they are still hypotheses, and to offer their self-evident character as "evidence" would expose one to ridicule. Meanings may be self-evident (the Cartesian "clear and distinct") and truth dubious.

[66] "Really known" is an ambiguous term. It may signify understood, or it may signify known to be there or given. Either meaning implies reference beyond.

[67] The reply implies that the exhaustive, all-at-once perception of the entire universe assumed by some idealistic writers does not involve any external world. I do not make this remark for the sake of identifying myself with this school of thinkers, but to suggest that the limited character of empirical data is what occasions inference. But it is a fallacy to suppose that the nature of the limitations is psychologically given. On the contrary, they have to be determined by descriptive identifications which involve reference to the more extensive world. Hence no matter how "self-evident" the existence of the data may be, it is never self-evident that they are rightly delimited with respect to the specific inference in process of making.

[68] The ambiguities reside in the possibility of treating the "muscular and other bodily sensations" as meaning something other than data of motion and corporealness—however these be defined. Muscular sensation may be an awareness of motion of the muscles, but the phrase "of the muscles" does not alter the nature of motion as motion; it only specifies what motion is involved. And the long controversy about the existence of immediate "muscular sensations" testifies to what a complex cognitive determination we are here dealing with. Anatomical directions and long experimentation were required to answer the question. Were they psychologically primitive data no such questions could ever have arisen.

[69] William James, Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. (Popular Lectures on Philosophy.) New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1907. Pp. xiii+309.

[70] Certain aspects of the doctrine are here purposely omitted, and will meet us later.

[71] Vol. IV, p. 547.

[72] Only those who have already lost in the idealistic confusion of existence and meaning will take this to mean that the object is those changes in our reactions.

[73] I assume that the reader is sufficiently familiar with Mr. James's book not to be misled by the text into thinking that Mr. James himself discriminates as I have done these three types of problems from one another. He does not; but, none the less, the three formulae for the three situations are there.

[74] The idea of immortality, or the traditional theistic idea of God, for example, may produce its good consequences, not in virtue of the idea as idea, but from the character of the person who entertains the belief; or it may be the idea of the supreme value of ideal considerations, rather than that of their temporal duration, which works.

[75] "Eternal truth" is one of the most ambiguous phrases that philosophers trip over. It may mean eternally in existence; or that a statement which is ever true is always true (if it is true a fly is buzzing, it is eternally true that just now a fly buzzed); or it may mean that some truths, in so far as wholly conceptual, are irrelevant to any particular time determination, since they are non-existential in import—e.g., the truth of geometry dialectically taken—that is, without asking whether any particular existence exemplifies them.

[76] Such statements, it ought in fairness to be said, generally come when Mr. James is speaking of a doctrine which he does not himself believe, and arise, I think, in that fairness and frankness of Mr. James, so unusual in philosophers, which cause him to lean over backward—unpragmatically, it seems to me. As to the claim of his own doctrine, he consistently sticks to his statement: "Pent in, as the pragmatist, more than any one, sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who, so well as he, feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations? If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandments one day, says Emerson" (p. 233).

[77] Of course, Mr. James holds that this "in so far" goes a very small way. See pp. 77-79. But even the slightest concession is, I think, non-pragmatic unless the satisfaction is relevant to the idea as intent. Now the satisfaction in question comes not from the idea as idea, but from its acceptance as true. Can a satisfaction dependent on an assumption that an idea is already true be relevant to testing the truth of an idea? And can an idea, like that of the absolute, which, if true, "absolutely" precludes any appeal to consequences as test of truth, be confirmed by use of the pragmatic test without sheer self-contradiction? In other words, we have a confusion of the test of an idea as idea, with that of the value of a belief as belief. On the other hand, it is quite possible that all Mr. James intends by truth here is true (i.e., genuine) meaning at stake in the issue—true not as distinct from false, but from meaningless or verbal.

[78] Scientific Method in Philosophy, p. 57.

[79] The analytic realists have shown a peculiar disinclination to discuss the nature of future consequences as terms of propositions. They certainly are not identical with the mental act of referring to them; they are "objective" to it. Do they, therefore, already subsist in some realm of subsistence? Or is subsistence but a name for the fact of logical reference, leaving the determination of the meaning of "subsistence" dependent upon a determination of the meaning of "logical"? More generally, what is the position of analytic realism about the future?

[80] Supposing the question to be that of some molten state of the earth in past geologic ages. Taken as the complete subject-matter of a proposition—or science—the facts discovered cannot be regarded as causative of, or a mechanism of, the appearance of life. For by definition they form a closed system; to introduce reference to a future event is to deny the definition. Contrariwise, a statement of that past condition of the earth as a mechanical condition of the later emergence of life means that that past stage is taken not merely as past, but as in process of transition to its future, as in process of alteration in the direction of life. Change in this direction is an integral part of a statement of the early stage of the earth's history. A purely geologic statement may be quite accurate in its own universe of discourse and yet quite incomplete and hence inaccurate in another universe of discourse. That is to say, a geologist's propositions may accurately set forth a prior state of things, while ignoring any reference to a later state entailed by them. But a would-be philosophy may not ignore the implied future.

[81] Philosophical Essays, pp. 104, 105.

[82] Sixth Meditation.

[83] Principles of Philosophy, p. 90.

[84] Treatise of Human Nature, Part III, sec. iii.

[85] It is perhaps poor tactics on my part to complicate this matter with anything else. But it is evident that "passions" and pains and pleasures may be used as evidences of something beyond themselves (as may the fact of being more than five feet high) and so get a representative or cognitive status. Is there not also a prima facie presumption that all sensory qualities are of themselves bare existences or occurrences without cognitive pretension, and that they acquire the latter status as signs or evidence of something else? Epistemological idealists or realists who admit the non-cognitive character of pleasure and pain would seem to be under special obligations carefully to consider the thesis of the non-cognitive nature of all sensory qualities except as they are employed as indications or indexes of some other thing. This recognition frees logic from the epistemological discussion of secondary qualities.

[86] To readers who have grasped the thought of my argument, it may not be meaningless to say that the typical idealistic fallacy is to import into the direct experience the results of the intellectual or reflective examination, while that of realism is to treat the reflective operation as dealing with precisely the same subject-matter as the original act was concerned with—taking the good of "reason" and the good of immediate behavior to be the same sort of things. And both fallacies will result from any assimilation of two different acts to one another through giving them both the title "knowledge," and hence treating the difference between them as simply the difference between a direct apprehension and a mediated one.

[87] Analytic realism ought to be favorable to such a hedonism; the fact that present-day analytic realists are not favorable would seem to indicate that they have not taken their logic seriously enough, but have been restrained, by practical motives, from applying it thoroughly. To say that the moral life presents a high degree of organization and integration is to say something which is true, but is also to say something which by the analytic logic calls for its resolution into ultimate and independent simples. Unless they accept the pleasures and pains of Bentham as such ultimates, they are bound to present acceptable substitutes. But here they tend to shift their logic and to make the fulfilment of some organization (variously defined) the standard good. Consistency would then admit the hypothesis that in all cases an eventual organization rather than antecedent simples supply the standard of knowledge. Meanwhile the term "fulfilment" (or any similar term) stands as an acknowledgment that the organization in question is not something ontologically prior but is one yet to be achieved.

[88] It must not be overlooked that a mere reminder of an end previously settled upon may operate as a sufficient stimulus to action. It is probably this act of calling the end to mind which the realist confuses with knowledge, and therefore terms apprehension. But there is nothing cognitive about it, any more than there is in pressing a button to give the signal for an act already decided upon.

[89] Upholders of this view generally disguise the assumption of repetition by the notion that what is judged is progress in the direction of approximation to an eternal value. But as matter of fact, progress is never judged (as I have had repeated occasion to point out) by reference to a transcendent eternal value, but in reference to the success of the end-in-view in meeting the needs and conditions of the specific situation—a surrender of the doctrine in favor of the one set forth in the text. Logically, the notion of progress as approximation has no place. The thesis should read that we always try to repeat a given value, but always fail as a matter of fact. And constant failure is a queer name for progress.

[90] See IX and X ante.

[91] I use the term "image" in the sense of optics, not of psychology.

[92] That something of the cognitive, something of the sign or term function, enters in as a catalyzer, so to speak, in even the most aesthetic experiences, seems to be altogether probable, but that question it is not necessary to raise here.

[93] The superstition that whatever influences the action of a conscious being must be an unconscious sensation or perception, if it is not a conscious one, should be summarily dismissed. We are active beings from the start and are naturally, wholly apart from consciousness, engaged in redirecting our action in response to changes in our surroundings. Alternative possibilities, and hence an indeterminate situation, change direct response into a response mediated by a perception as a sign of possibilities, that is, a physiological stimulus into a perceived quality: a sensory datum.

[94] Compare Woodbridge, Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, X, 5.

[95] See Russell, Scientific Method in Philosophy, p. 53.

[96] Ibid., p. 101.

[97] See the essay on The Existence of the World as a Logical Problem.