The distinction _between_ each attitude and function and its predecessor
and successor is serial, dynamic, operative. The distinctions _within_
any given operation or function are structural, contemporaneous, and
distributive. Thinking follows, we will say, striving, and doing follows
thinking. Each in the fulfilment of its own function inevitably calls
out its successor. But coincident, simultaneous, and correspondent
_within_ doing, is the distinction of doer and of deed; _within_ the
function of thought, of thinking and material thought upon; within the
function of striving, of obstacle of aim, of means and end. We keep our
paths straight because we do not confuse the sequential, efficient, and
functional relationship of types of experience with the contemporaneous,
correlative, and structural distinctions of elements within a given
function. In the seeming maze of endless confusion and unlimited
shiftings, we find our way by the means of the stimulations and checks
occurring within the process we are actually engaged with. We do not
contrast or confuse a condition or state which is an element in the
formation of one operation with the status or element which is one of
the distributive terms of another function. If we do, we have at once an
insoluble, because meaningless, problem upon our hands.
Now the epistemological logician deliberately shuts himself off from
those cues and checks upon which the plain man instinctively relies, and
which the scientific man deliberately searches for and adopts as
constituting his technique. Consequently he is likely to set the sort of
object or material which has place and significance only in one of the
serial functional situations of experience, over against the active
attitude which describes part of the structural constitution of another
situation; or with equal lack of justification to assimilate terms
characteristic of different stages to one another. He sets the agent, as
he is found in the intimacy of love or appreciation, over against the
externality of the fact, as that is defined within the reflective
process. He takes the material which thought selects as its own basis
for further procedure to be identical with the significant content which
it secures for itself in the successful pursuit of its aim; and this in
turn he regards as the material which was presented at the outset, and
whose peculiarities were the express means of awakening thought. He
identifies the final deposit of the thought-function with its own
generating antecedent, and then disposes of the resulting surd by
reference to some metaphysical consideration, which remains when logical
inquiry, when science (as interpreted by him), has done its work. He
does this, not because he prefers confusion to order, or error to truth,
but simply because, when the chain of historic sequence is cut, the
vessel of thought is afloat to veer upon a sea without soundings or
moorings. There are but two alternatives: either there is an object "in
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