Dewey is wholly justified, again, in maintaining that thought is not a faculty set apart from reality, and that what is 'given' to thought is a coherent world, not a mass of unmeaning sensations. He recognizes his substantial agreement with the modern idealists in these matters.[192] But the idealists, he believes, hold a constitutive conception of thought which is in conflict with the empirical description of thinking as a concrete activity in time. Reality, according to this conception, is a vast system of sensations brought into a rational order by logical forms, and finite thought, in its operations, simply apprehends or discovers the infinite order of the cosmos. "How does it happen," Dewey asks, "that the absolute constitutive and intuitive Thought does such a poor and bungling job that it requires a finite discursive activity to patch up its products?"[193] Against Lotze, such an indictment has considerable force, but its applicability to modern idealism is not so obvious. Modern idealism has insisted upon an empirical treatment of thought, and has definitely surrendered the abstract sensations of the older psychologies. Nor does idealism tend to treat finite thought as a process which merely 'copies' an eternally present nature. The issue between Dewey and the idealists is this: Does functionalism render an accurate empirical account of the nature of thought as a concrete process? In his third chapter Dewey discusses "Thought and its Subject-matter: The Datum of Thinking." The tensional situation passes into a thought situation, and reflection enters upon its work of restoring the equilibrium of experience. Certain characteristic processes attend the operation of thought. "The conflicting situation inevitably polarizes or dichotomizes itself. There is somewhat which is untouched in the contention of incompatibles. There is something which remains secure, unquestioned. On the other hand, there are elements which are rendered doubtful and precarious."[194] The unquestioned element is the _datum_; the uncertain element, the _ideatum_. Ideas are "impressions, suggestions, guesses, theories, estimates, etc., the facts are crude, raw, unorganized, brute."[195] There is an approximation to bare meaning on the one hand, and bare existence on the other. The first dichotomy passes into a second. "Once more, and briefly, both datum and ideatum may ... break up, each for itself, into physical and psychical."[196] The datum, or sense material, is all, somehow, matter and real, but one part of it turns out to have a psychical, another a physical form. Similarly, the ideatum divides into what is mere fancy, the psychical, and what is objectively valid, the physical.