This point of view makes it possible for logical theory to come to terms
with psychology.[2] When logic is considered as having to do with the
wholesale activity of thought per se, the question of the historic
process by which this or that particular thought came to be, of how its
object happens to present itself as sensation, or perception, or
conception, is quite irrelevant. These things are mere temporal
accidents. The psychologist (not lifting his gaze from the realm of the
changeable) may find in them matters of interest. His whole industry is
just with natural history--to trace series of psychical events as they
mutually excite and inhibit one another. But the logician, we are told,
has a deeper problem and an outlook of more unbounded horizon. He deals
with the question of the eternal nature of thought and its eternal
validity in relation to an eternal reality. He is concerned, not with
genesis, but with value, not with a historic cycle, but with absolute
distinctions and relations.
Still the query haunts us: Is this so in truth? Or has the logician of a
certain type arbitrarily made it thus by taking his terms apart from
reference to the specific occasions in which they arise and situations
in which they function? If the latter, then the very denial of historic
relationship and of the significance of historic method, is indicative
only of the unreal character of his own abstraction. It means in effect
that the affairs under consideration have been isolated from the
conditions in which alone they have determinable meaning and assignable
worth. It is astonishing that, in the face of the advance of the
evolutionary method in natural science, any logician can persist in the
assertion of a rigid difference between the problem of origin and of
nature; between genesis and analysis; between history and validity. Such
assertion simply reiterates as final a distinction which grew up and
had meaning in pre-evolutionary science. It asserts against the most
marked advance which scientific method has yet made a survival of a
crude period of logical scientific procedure. We have no choice save
either to conceive of thinking as a response to a specific stimulus, or
else to regard it as something "in itself," having just in and of itself
certain traits, elements, and laws. If we give up the last view, we must
take the former.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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