The contradiction appears equally when viewed from the side of
thought-activity and its characteristic forms. All our knowledge, after
all, of thought as constitutive is gained by consideration of the
operations of reflective thought. The perfect system of thought is so
perfect that it is a luminous, harmonious whole, without definite parts
or distinctions--or, if there are such, it is only reflection that
brings them out. The categories and methods of constitutive thought
itself must therefore be characterized in terms of the _modus operandi_
of reflective thought. Yet the latter takes place just because of the
peculiar problem of the peculiar conditions under which it arises. Its
work is progressive, reformatory, reconstructive, synthetic, in the
terminology made familiar by Kant. We are not only _not_ justified,
accordingly, in transferring its determinations over to constitutive
thought, but we are absolutely prohibited from attempting any such
transfer. To identify logical processes, states, devices, results that
are conditioned upon the primary fact of resistance to thought as
constitutive with the structure of such thought is as complete an
instance of the fallacy of recourse from one genus to another as could
well be found. Constitutive and reflective thought are, first, defined
in terms of their dissimilarity and even opposition, and then without
more ado the forms of the description of the latter are carried over
bodily to the former![14]
This is not meant for a merely controversial criticism. It is meant to
point positively toward the fundamental thesis of these chapters: All
the distinctions of the thought-function, of conception as over against
sense-perception, of judgment in its various modes and forms, of
inference in its vast diversity of operation--all these distinctions
come within the thought-situation as growing out of a characteristic
antecedent typical formation of experience; and have for their purpose
the solution of the peculiar problem with respect to which the
thought-function is generated or evolved: the restoration of a
deliberately integrated experience from the inherent conflict into which
it has fallen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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