Pure thought, of course, cannot be defended. At the same time, Dewey, like Lotze, tends to regard thought as a special function with a 'content' of its own. If thought is regarded as a special kind of process, having its own content in the way of instrumental concepts, the question inevitably arises: How shall these forms be employed to reach truth? How apply them correctly to the matter in hand? Dewey answers that the forms and hypotheses of thought, like the tools and scaffoldings for its operations, are especially designed for the labor which they have to perform. "There is no miracle in the fact that tool and material are adapted to each other in the process of reaching a valid conclusion.... Each has been slowly evolved with reference to its fit employ in the entire function; and this evolution has been checked at every point by reference to its own correspondent."[200] It is no doubt true that established conceptions, no less than temporary hypotheses, have been evolved in connection with, as a feature or part of, the subject-matter to which they pertain. But it is quite another thing to say that these evolved forms belong to thought, if by thought be meant the functional activity of Dewey's description. Dewey stresses the relevance of these forms to the thought-process, rather than their relevance to a particular sphere of discourse. His purpose is to show that distinctions which are valid within the process of knowing are not valid elsewhere, and the net result is to limit the faculty of thought as a whole, as well as the forms of thought. This result reveals itself most clearly in his discussion of the test of truth. "In that sense the test of reality is beyond thought, as thought, just as at the other limit thought originates out of a situation which is not reflectional in character. Interpret this before and beyond in a historic sense, as an affair of the place occupied and role played by thinking as a function in experience in relation to other functions, and the intermediate and instrumental character of thought, its dependence upon unreflective antecedents for its existence, and upon a consequent experience for its test of final validity, becomes significant and necessary."[201] This notion that the test of thought must be external to thought depends directly upon the doctrine that thought is a special activity of the kind heretofore described. It results from the occasionalism attributed by Dewey to the thinking process.