itself" of thought "in itself," or else there are a series of values
which vary with the varying functions to which they belong. If the
latter, the only way these values can be defined is by discriminating
the functions to which they belong. It is only conditions relative to a
specific period or epoch of development in a cycle of experience
which-enables one to tell what to do next, or to estimate the value and
meaning of what is already done. And the epistemological logician, in
choosing to take his question as one of thought which has its own form
just as "thought," apart from the limits of the special work it has to
do, has deprived himself of these supports and stays.
The problem of logic has a more general and a more specific phase. In
its generic form, it deals with this question: How does one type of
functional situation and attitude in experience pass out of and into
another; for example, the technological or utilitarian into the
æsthetic, the æsthetic into the religious, the religious into the
scientific, and this into the socio-ethical and so on? The more specific
question is: How does the particular functional situation termed the
reflective behave? How shall we describe it? What in detail are its
diverse contemporaneous distinctions, or divisions of labor, its
correspondent _statuses_; in what specific ways do these operate with
reference to each other so as to effect the specific aim which is
proposed by the needs of the affair?
This chapter may be brought to conclusion by reference to the more
alternate value of the logic of experience, of logic taken in its wider
sense; that is, as an account of the sequence of the various typical
functions or situations of experience in their determining relations to
one another. Philosophy, defined as such a logic, makes no pretense to
be an account of a closed and finished universe. Its business is not to
secure or guarantee any particular reality or value. _Per contra_, it
gets the significance of a method. The right relationship and adjustment
of the various typical phases of experience to one another is a problem
felt in every department of life. Intellectual rectification and control
of these adjustments cannot fail to reflect itself in an added clearness
and security on the practical side. It may be that general logic can not
become an instrument in the immediate direction of the activities of
science or art or industry; but it is of value in criticising and in
organizing the tools of immediate research in these lines. It also has
direct significance in the valuation for social or life-purposes of
results achieved in particular branches. Much of the immediate business
of life is badly done because we do not know in relation to its
congeners the organic genesis and outcome of the work that occupies us.
The manner and degree of appropriation of the values achieved in various
departments of social interest and vocation are partial and faulty
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