positions into which one of the most vigorous and acute of modern
logicians, Lotze, has been forced through failing to define logical
distinctions in terms of the history of readjustment and control of
things in experience, and being thereby compelled to interpret certain
notions as absolute instead of as historic and methodological.
Before passing directly to the exposition and criticism of Lotze, it
will be well, however, to take the matter in a somewhat freer way. We
cannot approach logical inquiry in a wholly direct and uncompromised
manner. Of necessity we bring to it certain distinctions--distinctions
partly the outcome of concrete experience; partly due to the logical
theory which has got embodied in ordinary language and in current
intellectual habits; partly results of deliberate scientific and
philosophic inquiry. These more or less ready-made results are
resources; they are the only weapons with which we can attack the new
problem. Yet they are full of unexamined assumptions; they commit us
to all sorts of logically predetermined conclusions. In one sense our
study of the new subject-matter, let us say logical theory, is in
truth only a review, a retesting and criticizing of the intellectual
standpoints and methods which we bring with us to the study.
Nowadays everyone comes with certain distinctions already made between
the subjective and the objective, between the physical and the mental,
between the intellectual and the factual. (1) We have learned to
regard the region of emotional disturbance, of uncertainty and
aspiration, as belonging peculiarly to ourselves; we have learned to
set over against this the world of observation and of valid thought as
something unaffected by our moods, hopes, fears, and opinions. (2) We
have also come to distinguish between what is immediately present in
our experience and the past and the future; we contrast the realms of
memory and anticipation with that of sense perception; more generally
we contrast the given with the inferential. (3) We are confirmed in a
habit of distinguishing between what we call actual fact and our
mental attitude toward that fact--the attitude of surmise or wonder or
reflective investigation. While one of the aims of logical theory is
precisely to make us critically conscious of the significance and
bearing of these various distinctions, to change them from ready-made
assumptions into controlled conceptions, our mental habits are so set
that they tend to have their own way with us; we read into logical
theory conceptions that were formed before we had even dreamed of the
logical undertaking which after all has for its business to assign to
the terms in question their proper meaning. Our conclusions are thus
controlled by the very notions which need criticism and revision.
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