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and reference which is already almost, if not quite, the effect of comparing, of relating, and these are the express traits of thinking.
It is easy to interpret this miraculous gift of grace in the light of what has been said. The data are in truth precisely that which is selected and set aside as present, as immediate. Thus they are given to further thought. But the selection has occurred in view of the need for thought; it is a listing of the capital in the way of the undisturbed, the undiscussed, which thought can count upon in this particular problem. Hence it is not strange that it has a peculiar fitness of adaptation for thought's further work. Having been selected with precisely that end in view, the wonder would be if it were not so fitted. A man may coin counterfeit money for use upon others, but hardly with the intent of passing it off upon himself.
Our only difficulty here is that the mind flies away from the logical interpretation of sense-datum to a ready-made notion of it brought over from abstract psychological inquiry. The belief in sensory quales as somehow forced upon us, and forced upon us at large, and thus conditioning thought wholly ab extra, instead of determining it as instrumentalities or elements in its own scheme, is too fixed. Such qualities are forced upon us, but not at large. The sensory data of experience, as distinct from the psychologists' constructs, always come in a context; they always appear as variations in a continuum of values. Even the thunder which breaks in upon me (to take the extreme of apparent discontinuity and irrelevancy) disturbs me because it is taken as a part of the same space-world as that in which my chair and room and house are located; and it is taken as an influence which interrupts and disturbs, because it is part of my common world of causes and effects. The solution of continuity is itself practical or teleological, and thus presupposes and affects continuity of purpose, occupations, and means in a life-process. It is not metaphysics, it is biology which enforces the idea that actual sensation is not only determined as an event in a world of events,[23] but is an occurrence occurring at a certain period in the evolution of experience, marking a certain point in its cycle, and, consequently—having always its own conscious context and bearings—is a characteristic function of reconstruction in experience.[24]
2. Forms of thinking data.—As sensory datum is material set for the work of thought, so the ideational forms with which thought does its work are apt and prompt to meet the needs of the material. The "accessory"[25] notion of ground of coherence turns out, in truth, not to be a formal, or external, addition to the data, but a requalification of them. Thought is accessory as accomplice, not as addendum. "Thought" is to eliminate mere coincidence, and to assert grounded coherence. Lotze makes it absolutely clear that he does not at bottom conceive of "thought" as an activity "in itself" imposing a form of coherence; but that the organizing work of "thought" is only the progressive realization of an inherent unity, or system, in the material experience. The specific modes in which thought brings its "accessory" power to bear—names, conception, judgment, and inference—are successive stages in the adequate organization of the matter which comes to us first as datum; they are successive stages of the effort to overcome the original defects of the datum. Conception starts from the given universal (the common element) of sense. Yet (and this is the significant point) it does not simply abstract this common element, and consciously generalize it as over against its own differences. Such a "universal" is not coherence, just because it does not include and dominate the temporal and local heterogeneity. The true concept (see Vol. I, p. 38) is a system of attributes, held together on the basis of some ground, or determining, dominating principle—a ground which so controls all its own instances as to make them into an inwardly connected whole, and so specifies its own limits as to be exclusive of all else. If we abstract color as the common element of various colors, the result is not a scientific idea or concept. Discovery of a process of light-waves whose various rates constitute the various colors of the spectrum gives the concept. And when we get such a concept, the former mere temporal abruptness of color experiences gives way to organic parts of a color system. The logical product—the concept, in other words—is not a formal seal or stamp; it is a thoroughgoing transformation of data in a given sense.
The form or mode of thought which marks the continued transformation of the data and the idea in reference to each other is judgment. Judgment makes explicit the assumption of a principle which determines connection within an individualized whole. It definitely states red as this case or instance of the law or process of color, and thus overcomes further the defect in subject-matter or data still left by conception.[26] Now judgment logically terminates in disjunction. It gives a universal which may determine any one of a number of alternative defined particulars, but which is arbitrary as to what one is selected. Systematic inference brings to light the material conditions under which the law, or dominating universal, applies to this, rather than that alternative particular, and so completes the ideal organization of the subject-matter. If this act were complete, we should finally have present to us a whole on which we should know the determining and effective or authorizing elements, and the order of development or hierarchy of dependence, in which others follow from them.[27]
In this account by Lotze of the operations of the forms of thought, there is clearly put before us the picture of a continuous correlative determination of datum on one side and of idea or meaning on the other, till experience is again integral, data thoroughly defined and corrected, and ideas completely incarnate as the relevant meaning of subject-matter. That we have here in outline a description of what actually occurs there can be no doubt. But there is as little doubt that it is thoroughly inconsistent with Lotze's supposition that the material or data of thought is precisely the same as the antecedents of thought; or that ideas, conceptions, are purely mental somewhats brought to bear, as the sole essential characteristics of thought, extraneously upon a material provided ready-made. It means but one thing: The maintenance of unity and wholeness in experience through conflicting contents occurs by means of a strictly correspondent setting apart of fact to be accurately described and properly related, and meaning to be adequately construed and properly referred. The datum is given in the thought-situation, and to further qualification of ideas or meanings. But even in this aspect it presents a problem. To find out what is given is an inquiry which taxes reflection to the uttermost. Every important advance in scientific method means better agencies, more skilled technique for simply detaching and describing what is barely there, or given. To be able to find out what can safely be taken as there, as given in any particular inquiry, and hence be taken as material for orderly and verifiable thinking, for fruitful hypothesis-making, for entertaining of explanatory and interpretative ideas, is one phase of the effort of systematic scientific inquiry. It marks its inductive phase. To take what is given in the thought-situation, for the sake of accomplishing the aim of thought (along with a correlative discrimination of ideas or meanings), as if it were given absolutely, or apart from a particular historic situs and context, is the fallacy of empiricism as a logical theory. To regard the thought-forms of conception, judgment, and inference as qualifications of "pure thought, apart from any difference in objects," instead of as successive dispositions in the progressive organization of the material (or objects) is the fallacy of rationalism. Lotze attempts to combine the two, thinking thereby to correct each by the other.
Lotze recognizes the futility of thought if the sense-data are final, if they alone are real, the truly existent, self-justificatory and valid. He sees that, if the empiricist were right in his assumption as to the real worth of the given data, thinking would be a ridiculous pretender, either toilfully and poorly doing over again what needs no doing, or making a wilful departure from truth. He realizes that thought really is evoked because it is needed, and that it has a work to do which is not merely formal, but which effects a modification of the subject-matter of experience. Consequently he assumes a thought-in-itself, with certain forms and modes of action of its own, a realm of meaning possessed of a directive and normative worth of its own—the root-fallacy of rationalism. His attempted compromise between the two turns out to be based on the assumption of the indefensible ideas of both—the notion of an independent matter of thought, on one side, and of an independent worth or value of thought-forms, on the other.
This pointing out of inconsistencies becomes stale and unprofitable save as we bring them back into connection with their root-origin—the erection of distinctions that are genetic and historic, and working or instrumental