Again it is worth noting that this mutation of logical into ontological elements seems to differ only "in position" from the universal logicism of absolute idealism.
What are these simple elements into which the mathematician and logician are to analyze the crude elements of the laboratory? And how are these elements to be put into operation in the laboratory? Let us picture an analytic logician meeting a physical scientist at a moment when the latter is distressed over the unmanageable complexity of his elements. Will the logician say to the scientist: "Your difficulty is that you are trusting too much to your mundane apparatus. The kingdom of truth cometh not with such things. Forsake your microscopes, test tubes, refractors and resonators, and follow me, and you shall behold the truly simple elements of which you have dreamed."? And when the moment of revelation arrives and the expectant scientist is solemnly told that the "simple elements" which he has sought so long are "terms and propositions," sense-data and universals, is it surprising that he does not seem impressed? Will he not ask: "What am I to do with these in the specific difficulties of my laboratory? Shall I say to the crude and complex elements of my laboratory operations: 'Be ye resolved into terms and propositions, sense-data and universals'; and will they forthwith obey this incantation and fall apart so that I may locate and remove the hidden source of my difficulty? Are you not mocking me and deceiving yourself with the old ontological argument? Your 'simple' elements—are they anything but the hypostatized process by which elements may be found?"[30]
The expounders as well as the critics of analytic logic have agreed that it reaches its most critical junction when it faces the problem of truth and error. There is no doubt that the logic of objective idealism, in other respects so similar to analytic logic, has at this point an advantage; for it retains just enough of the finite operation of knowing—an "infinitesimal" part will answer—to furnish the culture germs of error. But analytic logic having completely sterilized itself against this source of infection is in serious difficulty.
Here again it is Professor Holt who has the courage to follow—or shall we say "behold"?—his theory as it "generates" the doctrine that error is a given objective opposition of forces entirely independent of any such thing as a process of inquiry and all that such a process presupposes. "All collisions between bodies, all inference between energies, all process of warming and cooling, of starting and stopping, of combining and separating, all counterbalancings, as in cantilevers and gothic vaultings, are contradictory forces which can be stated only in propositions that manifestly contradict each other."[31] But the argument proves too much. For in the world of forces to which we have here appealed there is no force which is not opposed by others and no particle which is not the center of opposing forces. Hence error is ubiquitous. In making error objective we have made all objectivity erroneous. We find ourselves obliged to say that the choir of Westminster Abbey, the Brooklyn bridge, the heads on our shoulders are all supported by logical errors!
Following these illustrations of ontological contradictions there is indeed this interesting statement: "Nature is so full of these mutually negative processes that we are moved to admiration when a few forces coöperate long enough to form what we call an organism."[32] The implication is, apparently, that as an "opposition" of forces is error, "coöperation" of forces is truth. But what is to distinguish "opposition" from "coöperation"? In the illustration it is clear that opposing forces—error—do not interfere with coöperative forces—truth. Where should we find more counterbalancing, more starting and stopping, warming and cooling, combining and separating than in an organism? And if these processes can be stated only in propositions that are "manifestly contradictory," are we to understand that truth has errors for its constituent elements? Such paradoxes have always delighted the soul of absolute idealism. But, as we have seen, only the veil of an infinitesimal finitude intervenes between the logic of the objective universal of absolute idealism and the objective logic of analytic realism.
It is, of course, this predicament regarding objective truth and error that has driven most analytic logicians to recall the exiled psychological, "mental" act of knowing. It had to be recalled to provide some basis of distinction between truth and error, but, this act having already been conceived as incurably "subjective," the result is only an exchange of dilemmas. For the reinstatement of this act ipso facto reinstates the epistemological predicament to get rid of which it was first banished from logic.
Earnest efforts to escape this outcome have been made by attaching the act of knowing to the nervous system, and this is a move in the right direction. But so far the effort has been fruitless because no connection has been made between the knowing function of the nervous system and its other functions. The result is that the cognitive operation of the nervous system, as of the "psychical" mind, is that of a mere spectator; and the epistemological problem abides. An onlooking nervous system has no advantage over an "onlooking" mind. Onlooking, beholding may indeed be a part of a genuine act of knowing. But in that act it is always a stimulus or response to other acts. It is one of them;—never a mere spectator of them. It is when the act of knowing is cut off from its connection with other acts and finds itself adrift that it seeks metaphysical lodgings. And this it may find either in an empty psychical mind or in an equally empty body.[33]
If, in reinstating the act of knowing as a function of the nervous system, neo-realism had recognized the logical significance of the fact that the nervous system of which knowing is a function is the same nervous system of which loving and hating, desiring and striving are functions and that the transition from these to the operations of inquiry and knowing is not a capricious jump but a transition motived by the loving and hating, desiring and striving—if this had been recognized the logic of neo-realism would have been spared its embarrassments over the distinction of truth and error. It would have seen that the passage from loving and hating, desiring and striving to inquiry and knowing is made in order to renew and reform specific desires and strivings which, through conflict and consequent equivocation, have become fruitless and vain; and it must have seen that the results of the inquiry are true or false as they succeed or fail in this reformation and renewal.
But once more, it must steadily be kept in view that while the loving and hating, desiring and striving, which the logical operations are reforming and renewing, are functions of the nervous system, they are not functions of the nervous system alone, else the door of subjectivism again closes upon us. Loving and hating, desiring and striving have their "objects." Hence any reformation of these functions involves no less a reformation of their objects. When therefore we say that truth and error are relevant to desires and strivings, this means relevant to them as including their objects, not as entitized processes (such are the pitfalls of language) inclosed in a nervous system or mind. With this before us the relevance of truth and error to desires and strivings can never be made the basis for the charge of subjectivism. The conception of desires as peculiarly individual and subjective is a survival of the very isolation which is the source of the difficulty with truth and error. Hence the appeal to this isolation, made alike by idealism and realism, in charging instrumental logic with subjectivism is an elementary petitio.
Doubtless it will be urged again that the act of knowing is motived by an independent desire and striving of its own. This is of course consonant with the neo-realistic atomism, however inconsonant it may be with the conception of implication which it employs. If we take a small enough, isolated segment of experience we can find meaning for this notion, as we may for the idea that the earth is flat and that the sun moves around the earth. But as consequences accrue we find as great difficulties with the one as with the other. If the course of events did not bring us to book, if we could get off with a mere definition of truth and error we might go on piling up subsistential definitional logics world without end. But sublime adventurers, logically unregenerate and uninitiated, will go on sailing westward to the confusion and confounding of all definitional systems that leave them out of account.