Volume 1 — DIVISION A—NORMATIVE SCIENCE (continued 5)

1. The relation of logic as science to logic as art.

2. The relation of logic to psychology.

3. The relation of logic to metaphysics.

The development of nineteenth century logic has made an answer to the last two of the foregoing problems exceedingly difficult. Indeed, one may say that the evolution of modern epistemology has had a centrifugal influence on logic, and instead of growth towards unity of conception we have a chaos of diverse and discordant theories. The apple of discord has been the theory of knowledge. A score of years ago when Adamson wrote his admirable article in the Encyclopædia Britannica (article "Logic," 1882), he found the conditions much the same as I now find them. "Looking to the chaotic state of logical text-books at the present time, one would be inclined to say that there does not exist anywhere a recognized currently received body of speculations to which the title logic can be unambiguously assigned, and that we must therefore resign the hope of attaining by any empirical consideration of the received doctrine a precise determination of the nature and limits of logical theory." I do not, however, take quite so despondent a view of the logical chaos as the late Professor Adamson; rather, I believe with Professor Stratton (Psy. Rev. vol. III) that something is to be gained for unity and consistency by more exact delimitation of the subject-matter of the philosophical disciplines and their interrelations, which precision, if secured, would assist in bringing into clear relief the real problems of the several departments of inquiry, and facilitate the proper classification of the disciplines themselves.

The attempt to delimit the spheres of the disciplines, to state their interrelations and classify them, was made early in the history of philosophy, at the very beginning of the development of logic as a science by Aristotle. In Plato's philosophy, logic is not separated from epistemology and metaphysics. The key to his metaphysics is given essentially in his theory of the reality of the concept, which offers an interesting analogy to the position of logic in modern idealism. Before Plato there was no formulation of logical theory, and in his dialogues it is only contained in solution. The nearest approach to any formulation is to be found in an applied logic set forth in the precepts and rules of the rhetoricians and sophists. Properly speaking, Aristotle made the first attempt to define the subject of logic and to determine its relations to the other sciences. In a certain sense logic for Aristotle is not a science at all. For science is concerned with some ens, some branch of reality, while logic is concerned with the methodology of knowing, with the formal processes of thought whereby an ens or a reality is ascertained and appropriated to knowledge. In the sense of a method whereby all scientific knowledge is secured, logic is a propædeutic to the sciences. In the idealism of the Eleatics and Plato, thought and being are ultimately identical, and the laws of thought are the laws of being. In Aristotle's conception, while the processes of thought furnish a knowledge of reality or being, their formal operation constitutes the technique of investigation, and their systematic explanation and description constitute logic. Logic and metaphysics are distinguished as the science of being and the doctrine of the thought processes whereby being is known. Logic is the doctrine of the organon of science, and when applied is the organon of science. The logic of Aristotle is not a purely formal logic. He is not interested in the merely schematic character of the thought processes, but in their function as mediators of apodictic truth. He begins with the assumption that in the conjunction and disjunction of correctly formed judgments the conjunction or disjunction of reality is mirrored. Aristotle does not here examine into the powers of the mind as a whole; that is done, though fragmentarily, in the De Anima and Parva Naturalia, where the mental powers are regarded as phases of the processes of nature without reference to normation; but in his logic he inquires only into those forms and laws of thinking which mediate proof. Scientific proof, in his conception, is furnished in the form of the syllogism, whose component elements are terms and propositions. In the little tract On Interpretation (i. e. on the judgment as interpreter of thought), if it is genuine, the proposition is considered in its logical bearing. The treatise on the Categories, which discusses the nature of the most general terms, forms a connecting link between logic and metaphysics. The categories are the most general concepts or universal modes under which we have knowledge of the world. They are not simply logical relations; they are existential forms, being not only the modes under which thought regards being, but the modes under which being exists. Aristotle's theory of the methodology of science is intimately connected with his view of knowledge. Scientific knowledge in his opinion refers to the essence of things; for example, to those universal aspects of reality which are given in particulars, but which remain self-identical amidst the variation and passing of particulars. The universal, however, is known only through and after particulars. There is no such thing as innate knowledge or Platonic reminiscence. Knowledge, if not entirely empirical, has its basis in empirical reality. Causes are known only through effects. The universals have no existence apart from things, although they exist realiter in things. Empirical knowledge of particulars must, therefore, precede in time the conceptual or scientific knowledge of universals. In the evolution of scientific knowledge in the individual mind, the body of particulars or of sense-experience is to its conceptual transformation as potentiality is to actuality, matter to form, the completed end of the former being realized in the latter. Only in the sense of this power to transform and conceptualize, does the mind have knowledge within itself. The genetic content is experiential; the developed concept, judgment, or inference is in form noëtic. Knowledge is, therefore, not a mere "precipitate of experience," nor is Aristotle a complete empiricist. The conceptual form of knowledge is not immediately given in things experienced, but is a product of noëtic discrimination and combination. Of a sensible object as such there is no concept; the object of a concept is the generic essence of a thing; and the concept itself is the thought of this generic essence. The individual is generalized; every concept does or can embrace several individuals. It is an "aggregate of distinguishing marks," and is expressed in a definition. The concept as such is neither true nor false. Truth first arises in the form of a judgment or proposition, wherein a subject is coupled with a predicate, and something is said about something. A judgment is true when the thought (whose inward process is the judgment and the expression in vocal symbols is the proposition) regards as conjoined or divided that which is conjoined or divided in actuality; in other words, when the thought is congruous with the real. While Aristotle does not ignore induction as a scientific method, (how could he when he regards the self-subsistent individual as the only real?) yet he says that, as a method, it labors under the defect of being only proximate; a complete induction from all particulars is not possible, and therefore cannot furnish demonstration. Only the deductive process proceeding syllogistically from the universal (or essential truth) to the particular is scientifically cogent or apodictic. Consequently Aristotle developed the science of logic mainly as a syllogistic technique or instrument of demonstration. From this brief sketch of Aristotle's logical views it will be seen that the epistemological and metaphysical relations of logic which involve its greatest difficulty and cause the greatest diversity in its modern exponents, were present in undeveloped form to the mind of the first logician. It would require a mighty optimism to suppose that this difficulty and diversity, which has increased rather than diminished in the progress of historical philosophy, should suddenly be made to vanish by some magic of restatement of subject-matter, or theoretical delimitation of the discipline. As Fichte said of philosophy, "The sort of a philosophy that a man has, depends on the kind of man he is;" so one might almost say of logic, "The sort of logic that a man has, depends on the kind of philosopher he is." If the blight of discord is ever removed from epistemology, we may expect agreement as to the relations of logic to metaphysics. Meanwhile logic has the great body of scientific results deposited in the physical sciences on which to build and test, with some assurance, its doctrine of methodology; and as philosophy moves forward persistently to the final solution of its problems, logic may justly expect to be a beneficiary in its established theories.

After Aristotle's death logic lapsed into a formalism more and more removed from any vital connection with reality and oblivious to the profound epistemological and methodological questions that Aristotle had at least raised. In the Middle Ages it became a highly developed exercise in inference applied to the traditional dogmas of theology and science as premises, with mainly apologetic or polemical functions. Its chief importance is found in its application to the problem of realism and nominalism, the question as to the nature of universals. At the height of scholasticism realism gained its victory by syllogistically showing the congruity of its premises with certain fundamental dogmas of the Church, especially with the dogma of the unity and reality of the Godhead. The heretical conclusion involved in nominalism is equivalent (the accepted dogma of the Church being axiomatic) to reductio ad absurdum. A use of logic such as this, tending to conserve rather than to increase the body of knowledge, was bound to meet with attack on the awakening of post-renaissance interest in the physical world, and the acquirement of a body of truth to which the scholastic formal logic had no relation. The anti-scholastic movement in logic was inaugurated by Francis Bacon, who sought in his Novum Organum to give science a real content through the application of induction to experience and the discovery of universal truths from particular instances. The syllogism is rejected as a scientific instrument, because it does not lead to principles, but proceeds only from principles, and is therefore not useful for discovery. It permits at most only refinements on knowledge already possessed, but cannot be regarded as creative or productive. The Baconian theory of induction regarded the accumulation of facts and the derivation of general principles and laws from them as the true and fruitful method of science. In England this empirical view of logic has been altogether dominant, and the most illustrious English exponents of logical theory, Herschel, Whewell, and Mill, have stood on that ground. Since the introduction of German idealism in the last half century a new logic has grown up whose chief business is with the theory of knowledge.

Kant's departure in logic is based on an epistemological examination of the nature of judgment, and on the answer to his own question, "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" The a priori elements in knowledge make knowledge of the real nature of things impossible. Human knowledge extends to the phenomenal world, which is seen under the a priori forms of the understanding. Logic for Kant is the science of the formal and necessary laws of thought, apart from any reference to objects. Pure or universal logic aims to understand the forms of thought without regard to metaphysical or psychological relations, and this position of Kant is the historical beginning of the subjective formal logic.

In the metaphysical logic of Hegel, which rests on a panlogistic basis, being and thought, form and content, are identical. Logical necessity is the measure and criterion of objective reality. The body of reality is developed through the dialectic self-movement of the idea. In such an idealistic monism, formal and real logic are by the metaphysical postulate coincident.

Schleiermacher in his dialectic regards logic from the standpoint of epistemological realism, in which the real deliverances of the senses are conceptually transformed by the spontaneous activity of reason. This spirit of realism is similar to that of Aristotle, in which the one-sided a priori view of knowledge is controverted. Space and time are forms of the existence of things, and not merely a priori forms of knowing. Logic he divides into dialectic and technical logic. The former regards the idea of knowledge as such; the formal or technical regards knowledge in the process of becoming or the idea of knowledge in motion. The forms of this process are induction and deduction. The Hegelian theory of the generation of knowledge out of the processes of pure thought is emphatically rejected.

Lotze, who is undoubtedly one of the most influential and fruitful writers on logic in the last century, attempts to bring logic into closer relations with contemporary science, and is an antagonist of one-sided formal logics. For him logic falls into the three parts of (1) pure logic or the logic of thought; (2) applied logic or the logic of investigation; (3) the logic of knowledge or methodology; and this classification of the matter and problems of logic has had an important influence on subsequent treatises on the discipline. His logic is formal, as he describes it himself, in the sense of setting forth the modes of the operation of thought and its logical structure; it is real in the sense that these forms are dependent on the nature of things and not something independently given in the mind. While he aims to maintain the distinct separation of logic and metaphysics, he says (in the discussion of the relations between formal and real logical meaning) the question of meaning naturally raises a metaphysical problem: "Ich thue besser der Metaphysik die weitere Erörterung dieses wichtigen Punktes zu überlassen." (Log. 2d ed. p. 571.) How could it be otherwise when his whole view of the relations and validity of knowledge is inseparable from his realism or teleological idealism, as he himself characterizes his own standpoint?

Drobisch, a follower of Herbart, is one of the most thoroughgoing formalists in modern logical theory. He attempts to maintain strictly the distinction between thought and knowledge. Logic is the science of thought. He holds that there may be formal truth, for example, logically valid truth, which is materially false. Logic, in other words, is purely formal; material truth is matter for metaphysics or science. Drobisch holds, therefore, that the falsity of the judgment expressed in the premise from which a formally correct syllogism may be deduced, is not subject-matter for logic. The sphere of logic is limited to the region of inference and forms of procedure, his view of the nature and function of logic being determined largely by the bias of his mathematical standpoint. The congruity of thought with itself, judgments, conclusions, analyses, etc., is the sole logical truth, as against Trendelenburg, who took the Aristotelian position that logical truth is the "agreement of thought with the object of thought."

Sigwart looks at logic mainly from the standpoint of the technology of science, in which, however, he discovers the implications of a teleological metaphysic. Between the processes of consciousness and external changes he finds a causal relation and not parallelism. Inasmuch as thought sometimes misses its aim, as is shown by the fact that error and dispute exist, there is need of a discipline whose purpose is to show us how to attain and establish truth and avoid error. This is the practical aim of logic, as distinguished from the psychological treatment of thought, where the distinction between true and false has no more place than the distinction between good and bad. Logic presupposes the impulse to discover truth, and it therefore sets forth the criteria of true thinking, and endeavors to describe those normative operations whose aim is validity of judgment. Consequently logic falls into the two parts of (1) critical, (2) technical, the former having meaning only in reference to the latter; the main value of logic is to be sought in its function as art. "Methodology, therefore, which is generally made to take a subordinate place, should be regarded as the special, final, and chief aim of our science." (Logic, vol. i, p. 21, Eng. Tr.) As an art, logic undertakes to determine under what conditions and prescriptions judgments are valid, but does not undertake to pass upon the validity of the content of given judgments. Its prescriptions have regard only to formal correctness and not to the material truth of results. Logic is, therefore, a formal discipline. Its business is with the due procedure of thought, and it attempts to show no more than how we may advance in the reasoning process in such way that each step is valid and necessary. If logic were to tell us what to think or give us the content of thought, it would be commensurate with the whole of science. Sigwart, however, does not mean by formal thought independence of content, for it is not possible to disregard the particular manner in which the materials and content of thought are delivered through sensation and formed into ideas. Further, logic having for its chief business the methodology of science, the development of knowledge from empirical data, it ought to include a theory of knowledge, but it should not so far depart from its subjective limits as to include within its province the discussion of metaphysical implications or a theory of being. For this reason, Sigwart relegates to a postscript his discussion of teleology, but he gives an elaborate treatment of epistemology extending through vol. i and develops his account of methodology in vol. ii. The question regarding the relation between necessity, the element in which logical thought moves, and freedom, the postulate of the will, carries one beyond the confines of logic and is, in his opinion, the profoundest problem of metaphysics, whose function is to deal with the ultimate relation between "subject and object, the world and the individual, and this is not only basal for logic and all science, but is the crown and end of them all."

Wundt's psychological and methodological treatment of logic stands midway between the purely formal treatises on the one hand, and the metaphysical treatises on the other hand. The general standpoint of Wundt is similar to that of Sigwart, in that he discovers the function of logic in the exposition of the formation and methods of scientific knowledge; for example, in epistemology and methodology. Logic must conform to the conditions under which scientific inquiry is actually carried on; the forms of thought, therefore, cannot be separate from or indifferent to the content of knowledge; for it is a fundamental principle of science that its particular methods are determined by the nature of its particular subject-matter. Scientific logic must reject the theory that identifies thought and being (Hegel) and the theory of parallelism between thought and reality (Schleiermacher, Trendelenburg, and Ueberweg), in which the ultimate identity of the two is only concealed. Both of these theories base logic on a metaphysics, which makes it necessary to construe the real in terms of thought, and logic, so divorced from empirical reality, is powerless to explain the methods of scientific procedure. One cannot, however, avoid the acceptance of thought as a competent organ for the interpretation of reality, unless one abandons all question of validity and accepts agnosticism or skepticism. This interpretative power of thought or congruity with reality is translated by metaphysical logic into identity. Metaphysical logic concerns itself fundamentally with the content of knowledge, not with its evidential or formal logical aspects, but with being and the laws of being. It is the business of metaphysics to construct its notions and theories of reality out of the deliverances of the special sciences and inferences derived therefrom. The aim of metaphysics is the development of a world-view free from internal contradictions, a view that shall unite all particular and plural knowledges into a whole. Logic stands in more intimate relation to the special sciences, for here the relations are reciprocal and immediate; for example, from actual scientific procedure logic abstracts its general laws and results, and these in turn it delivers to the sciences as their formulated methodology. In the history of science the winning of knowledge precedes the formulation of the rules employed, that is, precedes any scientific methodology. Logic, as methodology, is not an a priori construction, but has its genesis in the growth of science itself and in the discovery of those tests and criteria of truth which are found to possess an actual heuristic or evidential value. It is not practicable to separate epistemology and logic, for such concepts as causality, analogy, validity, etc., are fundamental in logical method, and yet they belong to the territory of epistemology, are epistemological in nature, as one may indeed say of all the general laws of thought. A formal logic that is merely propædeutic, a logic that aims to free itself from the quarrels of epistemology, is scientifically useless. Its norms are valueless, in so far as they can only teach the arrangement of knowledge already possessed, and teach nothing as to how to secure it or test its real validity. While formal logic aims to put itself outside of philosophy, metaphysical logic would usurp the place of philosophy. Formal logic is inadequate, because it neither shows how the laws of thought originate, why they are valid, nor in what sense they are applicable to concrete investigation. Wundt, therefore, develops a logic which one may call epistemological methodological, and which stands between the extremes of formal logic and metaphysical logic. The laws of logic must be derived from the processes of psychic experience and the procedure of the sciences. "Logic therefore needs," as he says, "epistemology for its foundation and the doctrine of methods for its completion."

Lipps takes the view outright that logic is a branch of psychology; Husserl in his latest book goes to the other extreme of a purely formal and technical logic, and devotes almost his entire first volume to the complete sundering of psychology and logic.

Bradley bases his logic on the theory of the judgment. The logical judgment is entirely different from the psychological. The logical judgment is a qualification of reality by means of an idea. The predicate is an adjective or attribute which in the judgment is ascribed to reality. The aim of truth is to qualify reality by general notions. But inasmuch as reality is individual and self-existent, whereas truth is universal, truth and reality are not coincident. Bradley's metaphysical solution of the disparity between thought and reality is put forward in his theory of the unitary Absolute, whose concrete content is the totality of experience. But as thought is not the whole of experience, judgments cannot compass the whole of reality. Bosanquet objects to this, and maintains that reality must not be regarded as an ideal construction. The real world is the world to which our concepts and judgments refer. In the former we have a world of isolated individuals of definite content; in the latter, we have a world of definitely systematized and organized content. Under the title of the Morphology of Knowledge Bosanquet considers the evolution of judgment and inference in their varied forms. "Logic starts from the individual mind, as that within which we have the actual facts of intelligence, which we are attempting to interpret into a system" (Logic, vol. i, p. 247). The real world for every individual is his world. "The work of intellectually constituting that totality which we call the real world is the work of knowledge. The work of analyzing the process of this constitution or determination is the work of logic, which might be described ... as the reflection of knowledge upon itself" (Logic, vol. i, p. 3). "The relation of logic to truth consists in examining the characteristics by which the various phases of the one intellectual function are fitted for their place in the intellectual totality which constitutes knowledge" (ibid.). The real world is the intelligible world; reality is something to which we attain by a constructive process. We have here a type of logic which is essentially a metaphysic. Indeed, Bosanquet says in the course of his first volume: "I entertain no doubt that in content logic is one with metaphysics, and differs, if at all, simply in mode of treatment—in tracing the evolution of knowledge in the light of its value and import, instead of attempting to summarize its value and import apart from the details of its evolution" (Logic, vol. i, 247).

Dewey (Studies in Logical Theory, p. 5) describes the essential function of logic as the inquiry into the relations of thought as such to reality as such. Although such an inquiry may involve the investigation of psychological processes and of the concrete methods of science and verification, a description and analysis of the forms of thought, conception, judgment, and inference, yet its concern with these is subordinate to its main concern, namely, the relation of "thought at large to reality at large." Logic is not reflection on thought, either on its nature as such or on its forms, but on its relations to the real. In Dewey's philosophy, logical theory is a description of thought as a mode of adaptation to its own conditions, and validity is judged in terms of the efficiency of thought in the solution of its own problems and difficulties. The problem of logic is more than epistemological. Wherever there is striving there are obstacles; and wherever there is thinking there is a "material-in-question." Dewey's logic is a theory of reflective experience regarded functionally, or a pragmatic view of the discipline. This logic of experience aims to evaluate the significance of social research, psychology, fine and industrial art, and religious aspiration in the form of scientific statement, and to accomplish for social values in general what the physical sciences have done for the physical world. In Dewey's teleological pragmatic logic the judgment is essentially instrumental, the whole of thinking is functional, and the meaning of things is identical with valid meaning (Studies in Logical Theory, cf. pp. 48, 82, 128). The real world is not a self-existent world outside of knowledge, but simply the totality of experience; and experience is a complex of strains, tensions, checks, and attitudes. The function of logic is the redintegration of this experience. "Thinking is adaptation to an end through the adjustment of particular objective contents" (ibid. p. 81). Logic here becomes a large part, if not the whole, of a metaphysics of experience; its nature and function are entirely determined by the theory of reality.

In this brief and fragmentary résumé are exhibited certain characteristic movements in the development of logical theory, the construction put upon its subject-matter and its relation to other disciplines. The résumé has had in view only the making of the diversity of opinion on these questions historically salient. There are three distinct types of logic noticed here: (1) formal, whose concern is merely with the structural aspect of inferential thought, and its validity in terms of internal congruity; (2) metaphysical logic whose concern is with the functional aspect of thought, its validity in terms of objective reference, and its relation to reality; (3) epistemological and methodological logic, whose concern is with the genesis, nature, and laws of logical thinking as forms of scientific knowledge, and with their technological application to the sciences as methodology. I am not at present concerned with a criticism of these various viewpoints, excepting in so far as they affect the problem of the interrelationship of logic and the allied disciplines.

For my present purpose I reject the extreme metaphysical and formal positions, and assume that logic is a discipline whose business is to describe and systematize the formal processes of inferential thought and to apply them as practical principles to the body of real knowledge.

I wish now to take up seriatim the several questions touching the various relations of logic enumerated above, and first of all the question of the relation of logic as science to logic as art.

I. Logic as science and logic as art.

It seems true that the founder of logic, Aristotle, regarded logic not as a science, but rather as propædeutic to science, and not as an end in itself, but rather technically and heuristically as an instrument. In other words, logic was conceived by him rather in its application or as an art, than as a science, and so it continued to be regarded until the close of the Middle Ages, being characterized indeed as the ars artium; for even the logica docens of the Scholastics was merely the formulation of that body of precepts which are of practical service in the syllogistic arrangement of premises, and the Port Royal Logic aims to furnish l'art de penser. This technical aspect of the science has clung to it down to the present day, and is no doubt a legitimate description of a part of its function. But no one would now say that logic is an art; rather it is a body of theory which may be technically applied. Mill, in his examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (p. 391), says of logic that it "is the art of thinking, which means of correct thinking, and the science of the conditions of correct thinking," and indeed, he goes so far as to say (System of Logic, Introd. § 7): "The extension of logic as a science is determined by its necessities as an art." Strictly speaking, logic as a science is purely theoretical, for the function of science as such is merely to know. It is an organized system of knowledge, namely, an organized system of the principles and conditions of correct thinking. But because correct thinking is an art, it does not follow that a knowledge of the methods and conditions of correct thinking is art, which would be a glaring case of μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος. The art-bearings of the science are given in the normative character of its subject-matter. As a science logic is descriptive and explanatory, that is, it describes and formulates the norms of valid thought, although as science it is not normative, save in the sense that the principles formulated in it may be normatively or regulatively applied, in which case they become precepts. What is principle in science becomes precept in application, and it is only when technically applied that principles assume a mandatory character. Validity is not created by logic. Logic merely investigates and states the conditions and criteria of validity, being in this reference a science of evidence. In the very fact, however, that logic is normative in the sense of describing and explaining the norms of correct thinking, its practical or applied character is given. Its principles as known are science; its principles as applied are art. There is, therefore, no reason to sunder these two things or to call logic an art merely or a science merely; for it is both when regarded from different viewpoints, although one must insist on the fact that the rules for practical guidance are, so far as the science is concerned, quite ab extra. Logic, ethics, and æsthetics are all commonly (and rightly) called normative disciplines: they are all concerned with values and standards; logic with validity and evidence, or values for cognition; ethics with motives and moral quality in conduct, or values for volition; æsthetics with the standards of beauty, or values for appreciation and feeling. Yet none of them is or can be merely normative, or indeed as science normative at all; if that were so, they would not be bodies of organized knowledge, but bodies of rules. They might be well-arranged codes of legislation on conduct, fine art, and evidence, but not sciences. Strictly regarded, it is the descriptive and explanatory aspect of logic that constitutes its scientific character, while it is the specific normative aspect that constitutes its logical character. Values, whether ethical or logical, without an examination and formulation of their ground, relations, origin, and interconnection, would be merely rules of thumb, popular phrases, or pastoral precepts. The actual methodology of the sciences or applied logic is logic as art.

II. Relation of logic to psychology.

The differentiation of logic and psychology in such way as to be of practical value in the discussion of the disciplines has always been a difficult matter. John Stuart Mill was disposed to merge logic in psychology, and Hobhouse, his latest notable apologete, draws no fixed distinction between psychology and logic, merely saying that they have different centres of interest, and that their provinces overlap. Lipps, in his Grundzüge der Logik (p. 2), goes the length of saying that "Logic is a psychological discipline, as certainly as knowledge occurs only in the Psyche, and thought, which is developed in knowledge, is a psychical event." Now, if we were to take such extreme ground as this, their ethics, æsthetics, and pure mathematics would become at once branches of psychology and not coördinate disciplines with it, for volitions, the feelings of appreciation, and the reasoning of pure mathematics are psychical events. Such a theory plainly carries us too far and would involve us in confusion. That the demarcation between the two disciplines is not a chasmic cleavage, but a line, and that, too, an historically shifting line, is apparent from the foregoing historical résumé.

The four main phases of logical theory include: (1) the concept (although some logicians begin with the judgment as temporally prior in the evolution of language), (2) judgment, (3) inference, (4) the methodology of the sciences. The entire concern of logic is, indeed, with psychical processes, but with psychical processes regarded from a specific standpoint, a standpoint different from that of psychology. In the first place psychology in a certain sense is much wider than logic, being concerned with the whole of psychosis as such, including the feelings and will and the entire structure of cognition, whereas logic is concerned with the particular cognitive processes enumerated above (concept, judgment, inference), and that, too, merely from the point of view of validity and the grounds of validity. In another sense psychology is narrower than logic, being concerned purely with the description and explanation of a particular field of phenomena, whereas logic is concerned with the procedure of all the sciences and is practically related to them as their formulated method. The compass and aims of the two disciplines are different; for while psychology is in different references both wider and narrower than logic, it is also different in the problems it sets itself, its aim being to describe and explain the phenomena of mind in the spirit of empirical science, whereas the aim of logic is only to explain and establish the laws of evidence and standards of validity. Logic is, therefore, selective and particular in the treatment of mental phenomena, whereas psychology is universal, that is, it covers the entire range of mental processes as a phenomenalistic science; logic dealing with definite elements as a normative science. By this it is not meant that the territory of judgment and inference should be delivered from the psychologist into the care of the logician; through such a division of labor both disciplines would suffer. The two disciplines handle to some extent the same subjects, so far as names are concerned; but the essence of the logical problem is not touched by psychology, and should not be mixed up with it, to the confusion and detriment of both disciplines. The field of psychology, as we have said, is the whole of psychical phenomena; the aim of individual psychology in the investigation of its field is: (1) to give a genetic account of cognition, feeling, and will, or whatever be the elements into which consciousness is analyzed; (2) to explain their interconnections causally; (3) as a chemistry of mental life to analyze its complexes into their simplest elements; (4) to explain the totality structurally (or functionally) out of the elements; (5) to carry on its investigation and set forth its results as a purely empirical science; (6) psychology makes no attempt to evaluate the processes of mind either in terms of false and true, or good and bad. From this description of the field and function of psychology, based on the expressions of its modern exponents, it will be found impossible to shelter logic under it as a subordinate discipline. If one were to enlarge the scope of psychology to mean rational psychology, in the sense which Professor Howison advocates (Psychological Review, vol. iii, p. 652), such a subordination might be possible, but it would entail the loss of all that the new psychology has gained by the sharper delimitation of its sphere and problems, and would carry us back to the position of Mill, who appears to identify psychology with philosophy at large and with metaphysics.

In contradistinction to the aims of psychology as described in the foregoing, the sphere and problems of logic may be summarily characterized as follows: (1) All concepts and judgments are psychological complexes and processes and may be genetically and structurally described; that is the business of psychology. They also have a meaning value, or objective reference, that is, they may be correct or incorrect, congruous or incongruous with reality. The meaning, aspect of thought, or its content as truth is the business of logic. This subject-matter is got by regarding a single aspect in the total psychological complex. (2) Its aim is not to describe factual thought or the whole of thought, or the natural processes of thought, but only certain ideals of thinking, namely, the norms of correct thinking. Its object is not a datum, but an ideal. (3) While psychology is concerned with the natural history of reasoning, logic is concerned with the warrants of inferential reasoning. In the terminology of Hamilton it is the nomology of discursive thought. To use an often employed analogy, psychology is the physics of thought, logic an ethics of thought. (4) Logic implies an epistemology or theory of cognition in so far as epistemology discusses the concept and judgment and their relations to the real world, and here is to be found its closest connection with psychology. A purely formal logic, which is concerned merely with the internal order of knowledge and does not undertake to show how the laws of thought originate, why they hold good as the measures of evidence, or in what way they are applicable to concrete reality, would be as barren as scholasticism. (5) While logic thus goes back to epistemology for its bases and for the theoretical determination of the interrelation of knowledge and truth, it goes forward in its application to the practical service of the sciences as their methodology. Apart of its subject-matter is therefore the actual procedure of the sciences, which it attempts to organize into systematic statements as principles and formulæ. This body of rules given implicitly or explicitly in the workings and structure of the special sciences, consisting in classification, analysis, experiment, induction, deduction, nomenclature, etc., logic regards as a concrete deposit of inferential experience. It abstracts these principles from the content and method of the sciences, describes and explains them, erects them into a systematic methodology, and so creates the practical branch of real logic. Formal logic, therefore, according to the foregoing account, would embrace the questions of the internal congruity and self-consistency of thought and the schematic arrangement of judgments to insure formally valid conclusions; real logic would embrace the epistemological questions of how knowledge is related to reality, and how it is built up out of experience, on the one hand, and the methodological procedure of science, on the other. The importance of mathematical logic seems to be mainly in the facilitation of logical expression through symbols. It is rather with the machinery of the science than with its content and real problem that the logical algorithm or calculus is concerned. In these condensed paragraphs sufficient has been said, I think, to show that logic and psychology should be regarded as coördinate disciplines; for their aims and subject-matter differ too widely to subordinate the former under the latter without confusion to both.

I wish now to add a brief note on the relation of logic to another discipline.

III. Relation of logic to metaphysics.

As currently expounded, logic either abuts immediately on the territory of metaphysics at certain points or is entirely absorbed in it as an integral part of the metaphysical subject-matter. I regard the former view as not only the more tenable theoretically, but as practically advantageous for working purposes, and necessary for an intelligible classification of the philosophical disciplines. The business of metaphysics, as I understand it, is with the nature of reality; logic is concerned with the nature of validity, or with the relations of the elements of thought within themselves (self-consistency) and with the relations of thought to its object (real truth), but not with the nature of the objective world or reality as such. Further, metaphysics is concerned with the unification of the totality of knowledge in the form of a scientific cosmology; logic is concerned merely with the inferential and methodological processes whereby this result is reached. The former is a science of content; the latter is a science of procedure and relations. Now, inasmuch as procedure and relations apply to some reality and differ with different forms of reality, logic necessitates in its implications a theory of being, but such implications are in no wise to be identified with its subject-matter or with its own proper problems. Their consideration falls within the sphere of metaphysics or a broadly conceived epistemology, whose business it is to solve the ultimate questions of subject and object, thought and thing, mind and matter, that are implied and pointed to rather than formulated by logic. Inasmuch as the logical judgment says something about something, the scientific impulse drives us to investigate what the latter something ultimately is; but this is not necessary for logic, nor is it one of logic's legitimate problems, any more than it is the proper business of the physicist to investigate the mental implications of his scientific judgments and hypotheses or the ultimate nature of the theorizing and perceiving mind, or of causality to his world of matter and motion, although a general scientific interest may drive him to seek a solution of these ultimate metaphysical problems. Scientifically the end of logic and of every discipline is in itself; it is a territorial unity, and its government is administered with a unitary aim. Logic is purely a science of evidential values, not a science of content (in the meaning of particular reality, as in the special sciences, or of ultimate reality, as in metaphysics); its sole aim and purpose, as I conceive it, is to formulate the laws and grounds of evidence, the principles of method, and the conditions and forms of inferential thinking. When it has done this, it has, as a single science, done its whole work. When one looks at the present tendencies of logical theory, one is inclined to believe that the discipline is in danger of becoming an "Allerleiwissenschaft," whose vast undefined territory is the land of "Weissnichtwo." The strict delimitation of the field and problems of science is demanded in the interest of a serviceable division of scientific labor and in the interest of an intelligible classification of the accumulated products of research.

THE FIELD OF LOGIC

BY FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE

[Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University, New York, N. Y., since 1902. b. Windsor, Ontario, Canada, March 26, 1867. A.B. Amherst College, 1889; Union Theological Seminary, 1892; A.M. 1898, LL.D. 1903, Amherst College. Post-grad. Berlin University. Instructor in Philosophy, University of Minnesota, 1894-95; Professor of Philosophy and head of department, 1895-1902. Member of American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Philosophical Association, American Psychological Association. Editor of the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods.]

Current tendencies in logical theory make a determination of the field of logic fundamental to any statement of the general problems of the science. In view of this fact, I propose in this paper to attempt such a determination by a general discussion of the relation of logic to mathematics, psychology, and biology, especially noting in connection with biology the tendency known as pragmatism. In conclusion, I shall indicate what the resulting general problems appear to be.

I

There may appear, at first, little to distinguish mathematics in its most abstract, formal, and symbolic type from logic. Indeed, mathematics as the universal method of all knowledge has been the ideal of many philosophers, and its right to be such has been claimed of late with renewed force. The recent notable advances in the science have done much to make this claim plausible. A logician, a non-mathematical one, might be tempted to say that, in so far as mathematics is the method of thought in general, it has ceased to be mathematics; but, I suppose, one ought not to quarrel too much with a definition, but should let mathematics mean knowledge simply, if the mathematicians wish it. I shall not, therefore, enter the controversy regarding the proper limits of mathematical inquiry. I wish to note, however, a tendency in the identification of logic and mathematics which seems to me to be inconsistent with the real significance of knowledge. I refer to the exaltation of the freedom of thought in the construction of conceptions, definitions, and hypotheses.

The assertion that mathematics is a "pure" science is often taken to mean that it is in no way dependent on experience in the construction of its basal concepts. The space with which geometry deals may be Euclidean or not, as we please; it may be the real space of experience or not; the properties of it and the conclusions reached about it may hold in the real world or they may not; for the mind is free to construct its conception and definition of space in accordance with its own aims. Whether geometry is to be ultimately a science of this type must be left, I suppose, for the mathematicians to decide. A logician may suggest, however, that the propriety of calling all these conceptions "space" is not as clear as it ought to be. Still further, there seems to underlie all arbitrary spaces, as their foundation, a good deal of the solid material of empirical knowledge, gained by human beings through contact with an environing world, the environing character of which seems to be quite independent of the freedom of their thought. However that may be, it is evident, I think, that the generalization of the principle involved in this idea of the freedom of thought in framing its conception of space, would, if extended to logic, give us a science of knowledge which would have no necessary relation to the real things of experience, although these are the things with which all concrete knowledge is most evidently concerned. It would inform us about the conclusions which necessarily follow from accepted conceptions, but it could not inform us in any way about the real truth of these conclusions. It would, thus, always leave a gap between our knowledge and its objects which logic itself would be quite impotent to close. Truth would thus become an entirely extra-logical matter. So far as the science of knowledge is concerned, it would be an accident if knowledge fitted the world to which it refers. Such a conception of the science of knowledge is not the property of a few mathematicians exclusively, although they have, perhaps, done more than others to give it its present revived vitality. It is the classic doctrine that logic is the science of thought as thought, meaning thereby thought in independence of any specific object whatever.

In regard to this doctrine, I would not even admit that such a science of knowledge is possible. You cannot, by a process of generalization or free construction, rid thought of connection with objects; and there is no such thing as a general content or as content-in-general. Generalization simply reduces the richness of content and, consequently, of implication. It deals with concrete subject-matter as much and as directly as if the content were individual and specialized. "Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other," is a truth, not about thought, but about things. The conclusions about a fourth dimension follow, not from the fact that we have thought of one, but from the conception about it which we have framed. Neither generalization nor free construction can reveal the operations of thought in transcendental independence.

It may be urged, however, that nothing of this sort was ever claimed. The bondage of thought to content must be admitted, but generalization and free construction, just because they give us the power to vary conditions as we please, give us thinking in a relative independence of content, and thus show us how thought operates irrespective of, although not independent of, its content. The binomial theorem operates irrespective of the values substituted for its symbols. But I can find no gain in this restatement of the position. It is true, in a sense, that we may determine the way thought operates irrespective of any specific content by the processes of generalization and free construction; but it is important to know in what sense. Can we claim that such irrespective operation means that we have discovered certain logical constants, which now stand out as the distinctive tools of thought? Or does it rather mean that this process of varying the content of thought as we please reveals certain real constants, certain ultimate characters of reality, which no amount of generalization or free construction can possibly alter? The second alternative seems to me to be the correct one. Whether it is or not may be left here undecided. What I wish to emphasize is the fact that the decision is one of the things of vital interest for logic, and properly belongs in that science. Clearly, we can never know the significance of ultimate constants for our thinking until we know what their real character is. To determine that character we must most certainly pass out of the realm of generalization and free construction; logic must become other than simply mathematical or symbolic.

There is another sense in which the determination of the operations of thought irrespective of its specific content is interpreted in connection with the exaltation of generalization and free construction. Knowledge, it is said, is solely a matter of implication, and logic, therefore, is the science of implication simply. If this is so, it would appear possible to develop the whole doctrine of implication by the use of symbols, and thus free the doctrine from dependence on the question as to how far these symbols are themselves related to the real things of the world. If, for instance, a implies b, then, if a is true, b is true, and this quite irrespective of the real truth of a or b. It is to be urged, however, in opposition to this view, that knowledge is concerned ultimately only with the real truth of a and b, and that the implication is of no significance whatever apart from this truth. There is no virtue in the mere implication. Still further, the supposition that there can be a doctrine of implication, simply, seems to be based on a misconception. For even so-called formal implication gets its significance only on the supposed truth of the terms with which it deals. We suppose that a does imply b, and that a is true. In other words, we can state this law of implication only as we first have valid instances of it given in specific, concrete cases. The law is a generalization and nothing more. The formal statement gives only an apparent freedom from experience. Moreover, there is no reason for saying that a implies b unless it does so either really or by supposition. If a really implies b, then the implication is clearly not a matter of thinking it; and to suppose the implication is to feign a reality, the implications of which are equally free from the processes by which they are thought. Ultimately, therefore, logic must take account of real implications. We cannot avoid this through the use of a symbolism which virtually implies them. Implication can have a logical character only because it has first a metaphysical one.

The supposition underlying the conception of logic I have been examining is, itself, open to doubt and seriously questioned. That supposition was the so-called freedom of thought. The argument has already shown that there is certainly a very definite limit to this freedom, even when logic is conceived in a very abstract and formal way. The processes of knowledge are bound up with their contents, and have their character largely determined thereby. When, moreover, we view knowledge in its genesis, when we take into consideration the contributions which psychology and biology have made to our general view of what knowledge is, we seem forced to conclude that the conceptions which we frame are very far from being our own free creations. They have, on the contrary, been laboriously worked out through the same processes of successful adaptation which have resulted in other products. Knowledge has grown up in connection with the unfolding processes of reality, and has, by no means, freely played over its surface. That is why even the most abstract of all mathematics is yet grounded in the evolution of human experience.

In the remaining parts of this paper, I shall discuss further the claims of psychology and biology. The conclusion I would draw here is that the field of logic cannot be restricted to a realm where the operations of thought are supposed to move freely, independent or irrespective of their contents and the objects of a real world; and that mathematics, instead of giving us any support for the supposition that it can, carries us, by the processes of symbolization and formal implication, to recognize that logic must ultimately find its field where implications are real, independent of the processes by which they are thought, and irrespective of the conceptions we choose to frame.

II

The processes involved in the acquisition and systematization of knowledge may, undoubtedly, be regarded as mental processes and fall thus within the province of psychology. It may be claimed, therefore, that every logical process is also a psychological one. The important question is, however, is it nothing more? Do its logical and psychological characters simply coincide? Or, to put the question in still another form, as a psychological process simply, does it also serve as a logical one? The answers to these questions can be determined only by first noting what psychology can say about it as a mental process.

In the first place, psychology can analyze it, and so determine its elements and their connections. It can thus distinguish it from all other mental processes by pointing out its unique elements or their unique and characteristic connection. No one will deny that a judgment is different from an emotion, or that an act of reasoning is different from a volition; and no one will claim that these differences are entirely beyond the psychologist's power to ascertain accurately and precisely. Still further, it appears possible for him to determine with the same accuracy and precision the distinction in content and connection between processes which are true and those which are false. For, as mental processes, it is natural to suppose that they contain distinct differences of character which are ascertainable. The states of mind called belief, certainty, conviction, correctness, truth, are thus, doubtless, all distinguishable as mental states. It may be admitted, therefore, that there can be a thoroughgoing psychology of logical processes.

Yet it is quite evident to me that the characterization of a mental process as logical is not a psychological characterization. In fact, I think it may be claimed that the characterization of any mental process in a specific way, say as an emotion, is extra-psychological. Judgments and inferences are, in short, not judgments and inferences because they admit of psychological analysis and explanation, any more than space is space because the perception of it can be worked out by genetic psychology. In other words, knowledge is first knowledge, and only later a set of processes for psychological analysis. That is why, as it seems to me, all psychological logicians, from Locke to our own day, have signally failed in dealing with the problem of knowledge. The attempt to construct knowledge out of mental states, the relations between ideas, and the relation of ideas to things, has been, as I read the history, decidedly without profit. Confusion and divergent opinion have resulted instead of agreement and confidence. On precisely the same psychological foundation, we have such divergent views of knowledge as idealism, phenomenalism, and agnosticism, with many other strange mixtures of logic, psychology, and metaphysics. The lesson of these perplexing theories seems to be that logic, as logic, must be divorced from psychology.

It is also of importance to note, in this connection, that the determination of a process as mental and as thus falling within the domain of psychology strictly, has by no means been worked out to the general satisfaction of psychologists themselves. Recent literature abounds in elaborate discussion of the distinction between what is a mental fact and what not, with a prevailing tendency to draw the remarkable conclusion that all facts are somehow mental or experienced facts. The situation would be worse for psychology than it is, if that vigorous science had not learned from other sciences the valuable knack of isolating concrete problems and attacking them directly, without the burden of previous logical or metaphysical speculation. Thus knowledge, which is the peculiar province of logic, is increased, while we wait for the acceptable definition of a mental fact. But definitions, be it remembered, are themselves logical matters. Indeed, some psychologists have gone so far as to claim that the distinction of a fact as mental is a purely logical distinction. This is significant as indicating that the time has not yet come for the identification of logic and psychology.

In refreshingly sharp contrast to the vagueness and uncertainty which beset the definition of a mental fact are the palpable concreteness and definiteness of knowledge itself. Every science, even history and philosophy, are instances of it. What constitutes a knowledge ought to be as definite and precise a question as could be asked. That logic has made no more progress than it has in the answer to it appears to be due to the fact that it has not sufficiently grasped the significance of its own simplicity. Knowledge has been the important business of thinking man, and he ought to be able to tell what he does in order to know, as readily as he tells what he does in order to build a house. And that is why the Aristotelian logic has held its own so long. In that logic, "the master of them that know" simply rehearsed the way he had systematized his own stores of knowledge. Naturally we, so far as we have followed his methods, have had practically nothing to add. In our efforts to improve on him, we have too often left the right way and followed the impossible method inaugurated by Locke. Had we examined with greater persistence our own methods of making science, we should have profited more. The introduction of psychology, instead of helping the situation, only confuses it.

Let it be granted, however, in spite of the vagueness of what is meant by a mental fact, that logical processes are also mental processes. This fact has, as I have already suggested, an important bearing on their genesis, and sets very definite limits to the freedom of thought in creating. It is not, however, as mental processes that they have the value of knowledge. A mental process which is knowledge purports to be connected with something other than itself, something which may not be a mental process at all. This connection should be investigated, but the investigation of it belongs, not to psychology, but to logic.

I am well aware that this conclusion runs counter to some metaphysical doctrines, and especially to idealism in all its forms, with the epistemologies based thereon. It is, of course, impossible here to defend my position by an elaborate analysis of these metaphysical systems. But I will say this. I am in entire agreement with idealism in its claim that questions of knowledge and of the nature of reality cannot ultimately be separated, because we can know reality only as we know it. But the general question as to how we know reality can still be raised. By this I do not mean the question, how is it possible for us to have knowledge at all, or how it is possible for reality to be known at all, but how, as a matter of fact, we actually do know it? That we really do know it, I would most emphatically claim. Still further, I would claim that what we know about it is determined, not by the fact that we can know in general, but by the way reality, as distinct from our knowledge, has determined. These ways appear to me to be ascertainable, and form, thus, undoubtedly, a section of metaphysics. But the metaphysics will naturally be realistic rather than idealistic.

III

Just as logical processes may be regarded as, at the same time, psychological processes, so they may be regarded, with equal right, as vital processes, coming thus under the categories of evolution. The tendency so to regard them is very marked at the present day, especially in France and in this country. In France, the movement has perhaps received the clearer definition. In America the union of logic and biology is complicated—and at times even lost sight of—by emphasis on the idea of evolution generally. It is not my intention to trace the history of this movement, but I should like to call attention to its historic motive in order to get it in a clear light.

That the theory of evolution, even Darwinism itself, has radically transformed our historical, scientific, and philosophical methods, is quite evident. Add to this the influence of the Hegelian philosophy, with its own doctrine of development, and one finds the causes of the rather striking unanimity which is discoverable in many ways between Hegelian idealists, on the one hand, and philosophers of evolution of Spencer's type, on the other. Although two men would, perhaps, not appear more radically different at first sight than Hegel and Spencer, I am inclined to believe that we shall come to recognize more and more in them an identity of philosophical conception. The pragmatism of the day is a striking confirmation of this opinion, for it is often the expression of Hegelian ideas in Darwinian and Spencerian terminology. The claims of idealism and of evolutionary science and philosophy have thus sought reconciliation. Logic has been, naturally, the last of the sciences to yield to evolutionary and genetic treatment. It could not escape long, especially when the idea of evolution had been so successful in its handling of ethics. If morality can be brought under the categories of evolution, why not thinking also? In answer to that question we have the theory that thinking is an adaptation, judgment is instrumental. But I would not leave the impression that this is true of pragmatism alone, or that it has been developed only through pragmatic tendencies. It is naturally the result also of the extension of biological philosophy. In the biological conception of logic, we have, then, an interesting coincidence in the results of tendencies differing widely in their genesis.

It would be hazardous to deny, without any qualifications, the importance of genetic considerations. Indeed, the fact that evolution in the hands of a thinker like Huxley, for instance, should make consciousness and thinking apparently useless epiphenomena, in a developing world, has seemed like a most contradictory evolutionary philosophy. It was difficult to make consciousness a real function in development so long as it was regarded as only cognitive in character. Evolutionary philosophy, coupled with physics, had built up a sort of closed system with which consciousness could not interfere, but which it could know, and know with all the assurance of a traditional logic. If, however, we were to be consistent evolutionists, we could not abide by such a remarkable result. The whole process of thinking must be brought within evolution, so that knowledge, even the knowledge of the evolutionary hypothesis itself, must appear as an instance of adaptation. In order to do this, however, consciousness must not be conceived as only cognitive. Judgment, the core of logical processes, must be regarded as an instrument and as a mode of adaptation.

The desire for completeness and consistency in an evolutionary philosophy is not the only thing which makes the denial of genetic considerations hazardous. Strictly biological considerations furnish reasons of equal weight for caution. For instance, one will hardly deny that the whole sensory apparatus is a striking instance of adaptation. Our perceptions of the world would thus appear to be determined by this adaptation, to be instances of adjustment. They might conceivably have been different, and in the case of many other creatures, the perceptions of the world are undoubtedly different. All our logical processes, referring ultimately as they do to our perceptions, would thus appear finally to depend on the adaptation exhibited in the development of our sensory apparatus. So-called laws of thought would seem to be but abstract statements or formulations of the results of this adjustment. It would be absurd to suppose that a man thinks in a sense radically different from that in which he digests, or a flower blossoms, or that two and two are four in a sense radically different from that in which a flower has a given number of petals. Thinking, like digesting and blossoming, is an effect, a product, possibly a structure.

I am not at all interested in denying the force of these considerations. They have, to my mind, the greatest importance, and due weight has, as yet, not been given to them. To one at all committed to a unitary and evolutionary view of the world, it must indeed seem strange if thinking itself should not be the result of evolution, or that, in thinking, parts of the world had not become adjusted in a new way. But while I am ready to admit this, I am by no means ready to admit some of the conclusions for logic and metaphysics which are often drawn from the admission. Just because thought, as a product of evolution, is functional and judgment instrumental, it by no means follows that logic is but a branch of biology, or that knowledge of the world is but a temporary adjustment, which, as knowledge, might have been radically different. In these conclusions, often drawn with Protagorean assurance, two considerations of crucial importance seem to be overlooked, first, that adaptation is itself metaphysical in character, and secondly, that while knowledge may be functional and judgment instrumental, the character of the functioning has the character of knowledge, which sets it off sharply from all other functions.

It seems strange to me that the admission that knowledge is a matter of adaptation, and thus a relative matter, should, in these days, be regarded as in any way destroying the claims of knowledge to metaphysical certainty. Yet, somehow, the opinion widely prevails that the doctrine of relativity necessarily involves the surrender of anything like absolute truth. "All our knowledge is relative, and, therefore, only partial, incomplete, and but practically trustworthy," is a statement repeatedly made. The fact that, if our development had been different, our knowledge would have been different, is taken to involve the conclusion that our knowledge cannot possibly disclose the real constitution of things, that it is essentially conditional, that it is only a mental device for getting results, that any other system of knowledge which would get results equally well would be equally true; in short, that there can be no such thing as metaphysical or epistemological truth. These conclusions do indeed seem strange, and especially strange on the basis of evolution. For while the evolutionary process might, conceivably, have been different, its results are, in any case, the results of the process. They are not arbitrary. We might have digested without stomachs, but the fact that we use stomachs in this important process ought not to free us from metaphysical respect for the organ. As M. Rey suggests, in the Revue Philosophique for June, 1904, a creature without the sense of smell would have no geometry, but that does not make geometry essentially hypothetical, a mere mental construction; for we have geometry because of the working out of nature's laws. Indeed, instead of issuing in a relativistic metaphysics of knowledge, the doctrine of relativity should issue in the recognition of the finality of knowledge in every case of ascertainably complete adaptation. In other words, adaptation is itself metaphysical in character. Adjustment is always adjustment between things, and yields only what it does yield. The things or elements get into the state which is their adjustment, and this adjustment purports to be their actual and unequivocal ordering in relation to one another. Different conditions might have produced a different ordering, but, again, this ordering would be equally actual and unequivocal, equally the one ordering to issue from them. To suppose or admit that the course of events might have been and might be different is not at all to suppose or admit that it was or is different; it is, rather, to suppose and admit that we have real knowledge of what that course really was and is. This seems to be very obvious.

Yet the evolutionist often thinks that he is not a metaphysician, even when he brings all his conceptions systematically under the conception of evolution. This must be due to some temporary lack of clearness. If evolution is not a metaphysical doctrine when extended to apply to all science, all morality, all logic, in short, all things, then it is quite meaningless for evolutionists to pronounce a metaphysical sentence on logical processes. But if evolution is a metaphysics, then its sentence is metaphysical, and in every case of adjustment or adaptation we have a revelation of the nature of reality in a definite and unequivocal form. This conclusion applies to logical processes as well as to others. The recognition that they are vital processes can, therefore, have little significance for these processes in their distinctive character as logical. They are like all other vital processes in that they are vital and subject to evolution. They are unlike all others in that thought is unlike digestion or breathing. To regard logical processes as vital processes does not in any way, therefore, invalidate them as logical processes or make it superfluous to consider their claim to give us real knowledge of a real world. Indeed, it makes such a consideration more necessary and important.

A second consideration overlooked by the Protagorean tendencies of the day is that judgment, even if it is instrumental, purports to give us knowledge, that is, it claims to reveal what is independent of the judging process. Perhaps I ought not to say that this consideration is overlooked, but rather that it is denied significance. It is even denied to be essential to judgment. It is claimed that, instead of revealing anything independent of the judging process, judgment is just the adjustment and no more. It is a reorganization of experience, an attempt at control. All this looks to me like a misstatement of the facts. Judgment claims to be no such thing. It does not function as such a thing. When I make any judgment, even the simplest, I may make it as the result of tension, because of a demand for reorganization, in order to secure control of experience; but the judgment means for me something quite different. It means decidedly and unequivocally that in reality, apart from the judging process, things exist and operate just as the judgment declares. If it is claimed that this meaning is illusory, I eagerly desire to know on what solid ground its illusoriness can be established. When the conclusion was reached that gravitation varies directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance, it was doubtless reached in an evolutionary and pragmatic way; but it claimed to disclose a fact which prevailed before the conclusion was reached, and in spite of the conclusion. Knowledge has been born of the travail of living, but it has been born as knowledge.

When the knowledge character of judgment is insisted on, it seems almost incredible that any one would think of denying or overlooking it. Indeed, current discussions are far from clear on the subject. Pragmatists are constantly denying that they hold the conclusions that their critics almost unanimously draw. There is, therefore, a good deal of confusion of thought yet to be dispelled. Yet there seems to be current a pronounced determination to banish the epistemological problem from logic. This is, to my mind, suspicious, even when epistemology is defined in a way which most epistemologists would not approve. It is suspicious just because we must always ask eventually that most epistemological and metaphysical question: "Is knowledge true?" To answer, it is true when it functions in a way to satisfy the needs which generated its activity, is, no doubt, correct, but it is by no means adequate. The same answer can be made to the inquiry after the efficiency of any vital process whatever, and is, therefore, not distinctive. We have still to inquire into the specific character of the needs which originate judgments and of the consequent satisfaction. Just here is where the uniqueness of the logical problem is disclosed. With conscious beings, the success of the things they do has become increasingly dependent on their ability to discover what takes place in independence of the knowing process. That is the need which generates judgment. The satisfaction is, of course, the attainment of the discovery. Now to make the judgment itself and not the consequent action the instrumental factor seems to me to misstate the facts of the case. Nothing is clearer than that there is no necessity for knowledge to issue in adjustment. And it is clear to me that increased control of experience, while resulting from knowledge, does not give to it its character. Omniscience could idly view the transformations of reality and yet remain omniscient. Knowledge works, but it is not, therefore, knowledge.

These considerations have peculiar force when applied to that branch of knowledge which is knowledge itself. Is the biological account of knowledge correct? That question we must evidently ask, especially when we are urged to accept the account. Can we, to put the question in its most general form, accept as an adequate account of the logical process a theory which is bound up with some other specific department of human knowledge? It seems to me that we cannot. Here we must be epistemologists and metaphysicians, or give up the problem entirely. This by no means involves the attempt to conceive pure thought set over against pure reality—the kind of epistemology and metaphysics justly ridiculed by the pragmatist—for knowledge, as already stated, is given to us in concrete instances. How knowledge in general is possible is, therefore, as useless and meaningless a question as how reality in general is possible. The knowledge is given as a fact of life, and what we have to determine is not its non-logical antecedents or its practical consequences, but its constitution as knowledge and its validity. It may be admitted that the question of validity is settled pragmatically. No knowledge is true unless it yields results which can be verified, unless it can issue in increased control of experience. But I insist again that that fact is not sufficient for an account of what knowledge claims to be. It claims to issue in control because it is true in independence of the control. And it is just this assurance that is needed to distinguish knowledge from what is not knowledge. It is the necessity of exhibiting this assurance which makes it impossible to subordinate logical problems, and forces us at last to questions of epistemology and metaphysics.

As I am interested here primarily in determining the field of logic, it is somewhat outside my province to consider the details of logical theory. Yet the point just raised is of so much importance in connection with the main question that I venture the following general considerations. This is, perhaps, the more necessary because the pragmatic doctrine finds in the concession made regarding the test of validity one of its strongest defenses.

Of course a judgment is not true simply because it is a judgment. It may be false. The only way to settle its validity is to discover whether experience actually provides what the judgment promises, that is, whether the conclusions drawn from it really enable us to control experience. No mere speculation will yield the desired result, no matter with how much formal validity the conclusions may be drawn. That merely formal validity is not the essential thing, I have pointed out in discussing the relation of logic to mathematics. The test of truth is pragmatic. It is apparent, therefore, that the formal validity does not determine the actual validity. What is this but the statement that the process of judgment is not itself the determining factor in its real validity? It is, in short, only valid judgments that can really give us control of experience. The implications taken up in the judgment must, therefore, be real implications which, as such, have nothing to do with the judging process, and which, most certainly, are not brought about by it. And what is this but the claim that judgment as such is never instrumental? In other words, a judgment which effected its own content would only by the merest accident function as valid knowledge. We have valid knowledge, then, only when the implications of the judgment are found to be independent of the judging process. We have knowledge only at the risk of error. The pragmatic test of validity, instead of proving the instrumental character of judgment, would thus appear to prove just the reverse.

Valid knowledge has, therefore, for its content a system of real, not judged or hypothetical implications. The central problem of logic which results from this fact is not how a knowledge of real implications is then possible, but what are the ascertainable types of real implications. But, it may be urged, we need some criterion to determine what a real implication is. I venture to reply that we need none, if by such is meant anything else than the facts with which we are dealing. I need no other criterion than the circle to determine whether its diameters are really equal. And, in general, I need no other criterion than the facts dealt with to determine whether they really imply what I judge them to imply. Logic appears to me to be really as simple as this. Yet there can be profound problems involved in the working out of this simple procedure. There is the problem already stated of the most general types of real implication, or, in other words, the time-honored doctrine of categories. Whether there are categories or basal types of existence seems to me to be ascertainable. When ascertained, it is also possible to discover the types of inference or implication which they afford. This is by no means the whole of logic, but it appears to me to be its central problem.

These considerations will, I hope, throw light on the statement that while knowledge works, it is not therefore knowledge. It works because its content existed before its discovery by the knowledge process, and because its content was not effected or brought about by that process. Judgment was the instrument of its discovery, not the instrument which fashioned it. While, therefore, willing to admit that logical processes are vital processes, I am not willing to admit that the problem of logic is radically changed thereby in its formulation or solution, for the vital processes in question have the unique character of knowledge, the content of which is what it claims to be, a system of real implications which existed prior to its discovery.

In the psychological and biological tendencies in logic, there is, however, I think, a distinct gain for logical theory. The insistence that logical processes are both mental and vital has done much to take them out of the transcendental aloofness from reality in which they have often been placed, especially since Kant. So long as thought and object were so separated that they could never be brought together, and so long as logical processes were conceived wholly in terms of ideas set over against objects, there was no hope of escape from the realm of pure hypothesis and conjecture. Locke's axiom that "the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas," an axiom which Kant did so much to sanctify, and which has been the basal principle of the greater part of modern logic and metaphysics, is most certainly subversive of logical theory. The transition from ideas to anything else is rendered impossible by it. Now it is just this axiom which the biological tendencies in logic have done so much to destroy. They have insisted, with the greatest right, that logical processes are not set over against their content as idea against object, as appearance against reality, but are processes of reality itself. Just as reality can and does function in a physical or a physiological way, so also it functions in a logical way. The state we call knowledge becomes, thus, as much a part of the system of things as the state we call chemical combination. The problem how thought can know anything becomes, therefore, as irrelevant as the problem how elements can combine at all. The recognition of this is a great gain, and the promise of it most fruitful for both logic and metaphysics.

But, as I have tried to point out, all this surrendering of pure thought as opposed to pure reality, does not at all necessitate our regarding judgment as a process which makes reality different from what it was before. Of course there is one difference, namely, the logical one; for reality prior to logical processes is unknown. As a result of these processes it becomes known. These processes are, therefore, responsible for a known as distinct from an unknown reality. But what is the transformation which reality undergoes in becoming known? When it becomes known that water seeks its own level, what change has taken place in the water? It would appear that we must answer, none. The water which seeks its own level has not been transformed into ideas or even into a human experience. It appears to remain, as water, precisely what it was before. The transformation which takes place, takes place in the one who knows, a transformation from ignorance to knowledge. Psychology and biology can afford us the natural history of this transformation, but they cannot inform us in the least as to why it should have its specific character. That is given and not deduced. The attempts to deduce it have, without exception, been futile. That is why we are forced to take it as ultimate in the same way we take as ultimate the specific character of any definite transformation. To my mind, there is needed a fuller and more cordial recognition of this fact. The conditions under which we, as individuals, know are certainly discoverable, just as much as the conditions under which we breathe or digest. And what happens to things when we know them is also as discoverable as what happens to them when we breathe them or digest them.

But here the idealist may interpose that we can never know what happens to things when we know them, because we can never know them before they become known. I suppose I ought to wrestle with this objection. It is an obvious one, but, to my mind, it is without force. The objection, if pursued, can carry us only in a circle. The problem of knowledge is still on our hands, and every logician of whatever school, the offerer of this objection also, has, nevertheless, attempted to show what the transformation is that thought works, for all admit that it works some. Are we, therefore, engaged in a hopeless task? Or have we failed to grasp the significance of our problem? I think the latter. We fail to recognize that, in one way or other, we do solve the problem, and that our attempts to solve it show quite clearly that the objection under consideration is without force. Take, for instance, any concrete case of knowledge, the water seeking its own level, again. Follow the process of knowledge to the fullest extent, we never find a single problem which is not solvable by reference to the concrete things with which we are dealing, nor a single solution which is not forced upon us by these things rather than by the fact that we deal with them. The transformation wrought is thus discovered, in the progress of knowledge itself, to be wrought solely in the inquiring individual, and wrought by repeated contact with the things with which he deals. In other words, all knowledge discloses the fact that its content is not created by itself, but by the things with which it is concerned.

It is quite possible, therefore, that knowledge should be what we call transcendent and yet not involve us in a transcendental logic. That we should be able to know without altering the things we know is no more and no less remarkable and mysterious than that we should be able to digest by altering the things we digest. In other words, the fact that digestion alters the things is no reason that knowledge should alter them, even if we admit that logical processes are vital and subject to evolution. Indeed, if evolution teaches us anything on this point, it is that knowledge processes are real just as they exist, as real as growth and digestion, and must have their character described in accordance with what they are. The recognition that knowledge can be transcendent and yet its processes vital seems to throw light on the difficulty evolution has encountered in accounting for consciousness and knowledge. All the reactions of the individual seem to be expressible in terms of chemistry and physics without calling in consciousness as an operating factor. What is this but the recognition of its transcendence, especially when the conditions of conscious activity are quite likely expressible in chemical and physical terms? While, therefore, biological considerations result in the great gain of giving concrete reality to the processes of knowledge, the gain is lost, if knowledge itself is denied the transcendence which it so evidently discloses.

IV

The argument advanced in this discussion has had the aim of emphasizing the fact that in knowledge we have actually given, as content, reality as it is in independence of the act of knowing, that the real world is self-existent, independent of the judgments we make about it. This fact has been emphasized in order to confine the field of logic to the field of knowledge as thus understood. In the course of the argument, I have occasionally indicated what some of the resulting problems of logic are. These I wish now to state in a somewhat more systematic way.

The basal problem of logic becomes, undoubtedly, the metaphysics of knowledge, the determination of the nature of knowledge and its relation to reality. It is quite evident that this is just the problem which the current tendencies criticised have sought, not to solve, but to avoid or set aside. Their motives for so doing have been mainly the difficulties which have arisen from the Kantian philosophy in its development into transcendentalism, and the desire to extend the category of evolution to embrace the whole of reality, knowledge included. I confess to feeling the force of these motives as strongly as any advocate of the criticised opinions. But I do not see my way clear to satisfying them by denying or explaining away the evident character of knowledge itself. It appears far better to admit that a metaphysics of knowledge is as yet hopeless, rather than so to transform knowledge as to get rid of the problem; for we must ultimately ask after the truth of the transformation. But I am far from believing that a metaphysics of knowledge is hopeless. The biological tendencies themselves seem to furnish us with much material for at least the beginnings of one. Reality known is to be set over against reality unknown or independent of knowledge, not as image to original, idea to thing, phenomena to noumena, appearance to reality; but reality as known is a new stage in the development of reality itself. It is not an external mind which knows reality by means of its own ideas, but reality itself becomes known through its own expanding and readjusting processes. So far I am in entire agreement with the tendencies I have criticised. But what change is effected by this expansion and readjustment? I can find no other answer than this simple one: the change to knowledge. And by this I mean to assert unequivocally that the addition of knowledge to a reality hitherto without it is simply an addition to it and not a transformation of it. Such a view may appear to make knowledge a wholly useless addition, but I see no inherent necessity in such a conclusion. Nor do I see any inherent necessity of supposing that knowledge must be a useful addition. Yet I would not be so foolish as to deny the usefulness of knowledge. We have, of course, the most palpable evidences of its use. As we examine them, I think we find, without exception, that knowledge is useful just in proportion as we find that reality is not transformed by being known. If it really were transformed in that process, could anything else than confusion result from the multitude of knowing individuals?

To me, therefore, the metaphysics of the situation resolves itself into the realistic position that a developing reality develops, under ascertainable conditions, into a known reality without undergoing any other transformation, and that this new stage marks an advance in the efficiency of reality in its adaptations. My confidence steadily grows that this whole process can be scientifically worked out. It is impossible here to justify my confidence in detail, and I must leave the matter with the following suggestion. The point from which knowledge starts and to which it ultimately returns is always some portion of reality where there is consciousness, the things, namely, which, we are wont to say, are in consciousness. These things are not ideas representing other things outside of consciousness, but real things, which, by being in consciousness, have the capacity of representing each other, of standing for or implying each other. Knowledge is not the creation of these implications, but their successful systematization. It will be found, I think, that this general statement is true of every concrete case of knowledge which we possess. Its detailed working out would be a metaphysics of knowledge, an epistemology.

Since knowledge is the successful systematization of the implications which are disclosed in things by virtue of consciousness, a second logical problem of fundamental importance is the determination of the most general types of implication with the categories which underlie them. The execution of this problem would naturally involve, as subsidiary, the greater part of formal and symbolic logic. Indeed, vital doctrines of the syllogism, of definition, of formal inference, of the calculus of classes and propositions, of the logic of relations, appear to be bound up ultimately with a doctrine of categories; for it is only a recognition of basal types of existence with their implications that can save these doctrines from mere formalism. These types of existence or categories are not to be regarded as free creations or as the contributions of the mind to experience. There is no deduction of them possible. They must be discovered in the actual progress of knowledge itself, and I see no reason to suppose that their number is necessarily fixed, or that we should necessarily be in possession of all of them. It is requisite, however, that in every case categories should be incapable of reduction to each other.

A doctrine of categories seems to me to be of the greatest importance in the systematization of knowledge, for no problem of relation is even stateable correctly before the type of existence to which its terms belong has been first determined. I submit one illustration to reinforce this general statement, namely, the relation of mind to body. If mind and body belong to the same type of existence, we have one set of problems on our hands; but if they do not, we have an entirely different set. Yet volumes of discussion written on this subject have abounded in confusion, simply because they have regarded mind and body as belonging to radically different types of existence and yet related in terms of the type to which one of them belongs. The doctrine of parallelism is, perhaps, the epitome of this confusion.

The doctrine of categories will involve not only the greater part of formal and symbolic logic, but will undoubtedly carry the logician into the doctrine of method. Here it is to be hoped that recent tendencies will result in effectively breaking down the artificial distinctions which have prevailed between deduction and induction. Differences in method do not result from differences in points of departure, or between the universal and the particular, but from the categories, again, which give the method direction and aim, and result in different types of synthesis. In this direction, the logician may hope for an approximately correct classification of the various departments of knowledge. Such a classification is, perhaps, the ideal of logical theory.

SECTION D—METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCE

SECTION D—METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCE

(Hall 6, September 22, 3 p. m.)

Chairman:Professor James E. Creighton, Cornell University.

Speakers:Professor Wilhelm Ostwald, University of Leipzig.

Professor Benno Erdmann, University of Bonn.

Secretary:Dr. R. B. Perry, Harvard University.

ON THE THEORY OF SCIENCE

BY WILHELM OSTWALD

(Translated from the German by Dr. R. M. Yerkes, Harvard University)

[Wilhelm Ostwald, Professor of Physical Chemistry, University of Leipzig, since 1887. b. September 2, 1853, Riga, Russia. Grad. Candidate Chemistry, 1877; Master Chemistry, 1878; Doctor Chemistry, Dorpat. Dr. Hon. Halle and Cambridge; Privy Councilor; Assistant, Dorpat, 1875-81; Regular Professor, Riga 1881-87. Member various learned and scientific societies. Author of Manual of General Chemistry; Electro Chemistry; Foundation of Inorganic Chemistry; Lectures on Philosophy of Nature; Artist's Letters; Essays and Lectures; and many other noted works and papers on Chemistry and Philosophy.]

One of the few points on which the philosophy of to-day is united is the knowledge that the only thing completely certain and undoubted for each one is the content of his own consciousness; and here the certainty is to be ascribed not to the content of consciousness in general, but only to the momentary content.