This all describes the actual state of the case, but it is consistent
only with a logical theory which makes the distinction between fact and
hypothesis instrumental in the transformation of experience from a
confused into an organized form; not with Mill's notion that sensations
are somehow finally and completely given as ultimate facts, and that
ideas are mere re-registrations of such facts. It is perfectly just to
say that the hypothesis is impressed upon the mind (in the sense that
any notion which occurs to the mind is impressed) _in the course_ of an
experience. It is well enough, if one define what he means, to say that
the hypothesis is impressed (that is to say, occurs or is suggested)
through the medium of given facts, or even of sensations. But it is
equally true that the _facts_ are presented and that _sensations_ occur
within the course of an experience which is larger than the bare facts,
because involving the conflicts among them and the corresponding
intention to treat them in some fashion which will secure a unified
experience. Facts get power to suggest ideas to the mind--to
"impress"--only through their position in an entire experience which is
in process of disintegration and of reconstruction--their "fringe" or
feeling of tendency is quite as factual as they are. The fact that "the
conception we have obtained is the one we want can be known only when we
have done the work for the sake of which we wanted it," is enough to
show that it is not bare facts, but facts in relation to want and
purpose and purpose in relation to facts, which originate the
hypothesis.
It would be interesting to follow the history of discussion of the
hypothesis since the time of Whewell and of Mill, particularly in the
writings of Jevons, Venn, and Bosanquet. This history would refine the
terms of our discussion by introducing more complex distinctions and
relations. But it would be found, I think, only to refine, not to
introduce any fundamentally new principles. In each case, we find the
writer struggling with the necessity of distinguishing between fact and
idea; of giving the fact a certain primacy with respect to testing of
idea and of giving the idea a primacy with respect to the significance
and orderliness of the fact; and of holding throughout to a relationship
of idea with fact so intimate that the idea develops only by being
"compared" with facts (that is, used in construing them), and facts get
to be known only as they are "connected" through the idea--and we find
that what is a maze of paradoxes and inconsistencies from an absolute,
from a non-historic standpoint, is a matter of course the moment
it is looked at from the standpoint of experience engaged in
self-transformation of meaning through conflict and reconstitution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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