Since the essays were written, there has been an impressive revival of
realism, and also a development of a type of logical theory--the
so-called Analytic Logic--corresponding to the philosophical
aspirations of the new realism. This marked alteration of intellectual
environment subjects the doctrine of the essays to a test not
contemplated when they were written. It is one thing to develop a
hypothesis in view of a particular situation; it is another to test
its worth in view of procedures and results having a radically
different motivation and direction. It is, of course, impossible to
discuss the analytic logic in this place. A consideration of how some
of its main tenets compare with the conclusions outlined above will,
however, throw some light upon the meaning and the worth of the
latter. Although this was formulated with the idealistic and
sensationalistic logics in mind, the hypothesis that knowledge can be
rightly understood only in connection with considerations of time and
temporal position is a general one. If it is valid, it should be
readily applicable to a critical placing of any theory which ignores
and denies such temporal considerations. And while I have learned much
from the realistic movement about the full force of the position
sketched in the essays when adequately developed; and while later
discussions have made it clear that the language employed in the
essays was sometimes unnecessarily (though naturally) infected by the
subjectivism of the positions against which it was directed, I find
that the analytic logic is also guilty of the fault of temporal
dislocation.
In one respect, idealistic logic takes cognizance of a temporal
contrast; indeed, it may fairly be said to be based upon it. It seizes
upon the contrast in intellectual force, consistency, and
comprehensiveness between the crude or raw data with which science
sets out and the defined, ordered, and systematic totality at which it
aims--and which in part it achieves. This difference is a genuine
empirical difference. Idealism noted that the difference may properly
be ascribed to the intervention of thinking--that thought is what
makes the difference. Now since the outcome of science is of higher
intellectual rank than its data, and since the intellectualistic
tradition in philosophy has always identified degrees of logical
adequacy with degrees of reality, the conclusion was naturally drawn
that _the_ real world--absolute reality--was an ideal or
thought-world, and that the sense-world, the commonsense-world, the
world of actual and historic experience, is simply a phenomenal world
presenting a fragmentary manifestation of that thought which the
process of human thinking makes progressively explicit and articulate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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