Correspondence of reference here is as obvious as correlation of
existence. In the logical process, the datum is not just real existence,
and the idea mere psychical unreality. Both are modes of existence--one
of _given_ existence, the other of _mental_ existence. And if the
mental existence is in such cases regarded, from the standpoint of the
unified experience aimed at, as having only _possible_ value, the datum
also is regarded, from the value standpoint, as incomplete and
unassured. The very existence of the idea or meaning as separate _is_
the partial, broken up, and hence objectively unreal (from the validity
standpoint) character of the datum. Or, as we commonly put it, while the
ideas are impressions, suggestions, guesses, theories, estimates, etc.,
the facts are crude, raw, unorganized, brute. They lack relationship,
that is, assured place in the universe; they are deficient as to
continuity. Mere change of apparent position of sun, which is absolutely
unquestioned as datum, is a sheer abstraction from the standpoint either
of the organized experience left behind, or of the reorganized
experience which is the end--the objective. It is impossible as a
persistent object in experience or reality. In other words, datum and
ideatum are divisions of labor, co-operative instrumentalities, for
economical dealing with the problem of the maintenance of the integrity
of experience.
Once more, and briefly, both datum and ideatum may (and positively,
veritably, do) break up, each for itself, into physical and psychical.
In so far as the conviction gains ground that the earth revolves about
the sun, the old fact is broken up into a new cosmic existence, and a
new psychological condition--the recognition of a mental process in
virtue of which movements of smaller bodies in relation to very remote
larger bodies are interpreted in a reverse sense. We do not just
eliminate as false the source of error in the old content. We
reinterpret it as valid in its own place, viz., a case of the psychology
of apperception, although invalid as a matter of cosmic structure. In
other words, with increasing accuracy of determination of the given,
there comes a distinction, for methodological purposes, between the
_quality_ or matter of the sense-experience and its _form_--the
sense-perceiving, as itself a psychological fact, having its own place
and laws or relations. Moreover, the old experience, that of
sun-revolving, abides. But it is regarded as belonging to "me"--to this
experiencing individual, rather than to the cosmic world. It is
_psychic_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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