of its own realization, and thereby still going on.
The only consideration which prevents easy and immediate acceptance of
this view is the notion of thinking as something purely formal. It is
strange that the empiricist does not see that his insistence upon a
matter extraneously given to thought only strengthens the hands of the
rationalist with his claim of thinking as an independent activity,
separate from the actual make-up of the affairs of experience. Thinking
as a merely formal activity exercised upon certain sensations or images
or objects sets forth an absolutely meaningless proposition. The
psychological identification of thinking with the process of association
is much nearer the truth. It is, indeed, on the way to the truth. We
need only to recognize that association is of contents or matters or
meanings, not of ideas as bare existences or events; and that the type
of association we call thinking differs from the associations of casual
fancy and revery in an element of control by reference to an end which
determines the fitness and thus the selection of the associates, to
apprehend how completely thinking is a reconstructive movement of actual
contents of experience in relation to each other, and for the sake of a
redintegration of a conflicting experience.
There is no miracle in the fact that tool and material are adapted to
each other in the process of reaching a valid conclusion. Were they
external in origin to each other and to the result, the whole affair
would, indeed, present an insoluble problem--so insoluble that, if this
were the true condition of affairs, we never should even know that there
was a problem. But, in truth, both material and tool have been secured
and determined with reference to economy and efficiency in effecting the
end desired--the maintenance of a harmonious experience. The builder has
discovered that his building means building tools, and also building
material. Each has been slowly evolved with reference to its fit employ
in the entire function; and this evolution has been checked at every
point by reference to its own correspondent. The carpenter has not
thought at large on his building and then constructed tools at large,
but has thought of his building in terms of the material which enters
into it, and through that medium has come to the consideration of the
tools which are helpful. Life proposes to maintain at all hazards the
unity of its own process. Experience insists on being itself, on
securing integrity even through and by means of conflict.
This is not a formal question, but one of the placing and relations of
the matters or values actually entering into experience. And this in
turn determines the taking up of just those mental attitudes, and the
employing of just those intellectual operations, which most effectively
handle and organize the material. Thinking is adaptation _to_ an end
_through_ the adjustment of particular objective contents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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