The same sort of thing occurs on the side of thought, or meaning. The meaning or idea which is growing in acceptance, which is gaining ground as meaning-of-datum, gets logical or intellectual or objective force; that which is losing standing, which is increasingly doubtful, gets qualified as just a notion, a fancy, a prejudice, misconception—or finally just an error, a mental slip.
Evaluated as fanciful in validity it becomes a mere fancy in its existence.[23] It is not eliminated, but receives a new reference or meaning. Thus the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is not one between meaning as such and datum as such. It is a specification that emerges, correspondently, in both datum and ideatum. That which is left behind in the evolution of accepted meaning is still characterized as real, but real now in relation only to a way of experiencing—to a peculiarity of the organism. That which is moved toward is regarded as real in a cosmic or extra-organic sense.
1. The data of thought.—When we turn to Lotze, we find that he makes a clear distinction between the presented material of thought, its datum, and the typical characteristic modes of thinking in virtue of which the datum gets organization or system. It is interesting to note also that he states the datum in terms different from those in which the antecedents of thought are defined. From the point of view of the data or material upon which ideas exercise themselves, it is not coincidence, collocation, or succession that counts, but gradation of degrees in a scale. It is not things in spatial or temporal arrangement that are emphasized, but qualities as mutually distinguished, yet resembling and classed. There is no inherent inconceivability in the idea that every impression should be as incomparably different from every other as sweet is from warm. But by a remarkable circumstance such is not the case. We have series, and networks of series. We have diversity of a common—diverse colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. In other words, the data are sense qualities which, fortunately for thought, are given arranged as shades, degrees, variations, or qualities of somewhat that is identical.[24]
All this is given, presented, to our ideational activities. Even the universal, the common color which runs through the various qualities of blue, green, white, etc., is not a product of thought, but something which thought finds already in existence. It conditions comparison and reciprocal distinction. Particularly all mathematical determinations, whether of counting (number), degree (more or less), and quantity (greatness and smallness), come back to this peculiarity of the datum. Here Lotze dwells at considerable length upon the fact that the very possibility, as well as the success, of thought is due to this peculiar universalization or prima facie ordering with which its material is given to it. Such pre-established fitness in the meeting of two things that have nothing to do with each other is certainly cause enough for wonder and congratulation.
It should not be difficult to see why Lotze uses different categories in describing the material of thought from those employed in describing its antecedent conditions, even though, according to him, the two are absolutely the same.[25] He has different functions in mind. In one case, the material must be characterized as evoking, as incentive, as stimulus—from this point of view the peculiar feature of spatial and temporal arrangement in contrast with coherence or connection is emphasized. But in the other case the material must be characterized as affording stuff, actual subject-matter. Data are not only what is given to thought, but they are also the food, the raw material, of thought. They must be described as, on the one hand, wholly outside of thought. This clearly puts them into the region of sense perception. They are matters of sensation given free from all inferring, judging, relating influence. Sensation is just what is not called up in memory or in anticipated projection—it is the immediate, the irreducible. On the other hand, sensory-matter is qualitative, and quales are made up on a common basis. They are degrees or grades of a common quality. Thus they have a certain ready-made setting of mutual distinction and reference which is already almost, if not quite, the effect of comparing, of relating, effects which are the express traits of thinking.
It is easy to interpret this miraculous gift of grace in the light of what has been said. The data are in truth precisely that which is selected and set aside as present, as immediate. Thus they are given to further thought. But the selection has occurred in view of the need for thought; it is a listing of the capital in the way of the undisturbed, the undiscussed, which thought can count upon in this particular problem. Hence it is not strange that it has a peculiar fitness of adaptation for thought's further work. Having been selected with precisely that end in view, the wonder would be if it were not so fitted. A man may coin counterfeit money for use upon others, but hardly with the intent of passing it off upon himself.
Our only difficulty here is that the mind flies away from the logical interpretation of sense datum to a ready-made notion of it brought over from abstract psychological inquiry. The belief in isolated sensory quales which are somehow forced upon us, and forced upon us at large, and thus conditioning thought wholly ab extra, instead of determining it as instrumentalities or elements selected from experienced things for that very purpose, is too fixed. Sensory qualities are forced upon us, but not at large. The sensory data of experience always come in a context; they always appear as variations in a continuum. Even the thunder which breaks in upon me (to take the extreme of apparent discontinuity and irrelevancy) disturbs me because it is taken as thunder: as a part of the same space-world as that in which my chair and room and house are located; and it is taken as an influence which interrupts and disturbs, because it is part of a common world of causes and effects. The solution of continuity is itself practical or teleological, and thus presupposes and affects continuity of purpose, occupations, and means in a life-process. It is not metaphysics, it is biology which enforces the idea that actual sensation is not only determined as an event in a world of events,[26] but is an occurrence occurring at a certain period in the control and use of stimuli.[27]
2. Forms of thinking data.—As sensory datum is material set for work of thought, so the ideational forms with which thought does its work are apt and prompt to meet the needs of the material. The "accessory"[28] notion of ground of coherence turns out, in truth, not to be a formal, or external, addition to the data, but a requalification of them. Thought is accessory as accomplice, not as addendum. "Thought" is to eliminate mere coincidence, and to assert grounded coherence. Lotze makes it clear that he does not at bottom conceive of "thought" as an activity "in itself" imposing a form of coherence; but that the organizing work of "thought" is only the progressive realization of an inherent unity, or system, in the material experienced. The specific modes in which thought brings its "accessory" power to bear—names, conception, judgment, and inference—are successive stages in the adequate organization of the matter which comes to us first as data; they are successive stages of the effort to overcome the original defects of the data. Conception starts from the universal (the common element) of sense. Yet (and this is the significant point) it does not simply abstract this common element, and consciously generalize it over against its own differences. Such a "universal" is not coherence just because it does not include and dominate the temporal and local heterogeneity. The true concept (see I, 38) is a system of attributes, held together on the basis of some ground, or determining, dominating principle—a ground which so controls all its own instances as to make them into an inwardly connected whole, and which so specifies its own limits as to be exclusive of all else. If we abstract color as the common element of various colors, the result is not a scientific idea or concept. Discovery of a process of light-waves whose various rates constitute the various colors of the spectrum gives the concept. And when we get such a concept, the former mere temporal abruptness of color experiences gives way to ordered parts of a color system. The logical product—the concept, in other words—is not a formal seal or stamp; it is a thoroughgoing connection of data in a dynamic continuity of existence.
The form or mode of thought which marks the continued transformation of the data and the idea in reference to each other is judgment. Judgment makes explicit the assumption of a principle which determines connection within an individualized whole. It definitely states red as this case or instance of the law or process of color, and thus further overcomes the defect in subject-matter or data still left by conception.[29] Now judgment logically terminates in disjunction. It gives a universal which may determine any one of a number of alternative defined particulars, but which is arbitrary as to what one is selected. Systematic inference brings to light the material conditions under which the law, or dominating universal, applies to this, rather than that alternative particular, and so completes the ideal organization of the subject-matter. If this act were complete, we should finally have present to us a whole on which we should know the determining and effective or authorizing elements, and the order of development or hierarchy of dependence, in which others follow from them.[30]
In this account by Lotze of the operations of the forms of thought, there is clearly put before us the picture of a continuous correlative determination of datum on one side and of idea or meaning on the other, till experience is again integral, data being thoroughly defined and connected, and ideas being the relevant meanings of subject-matter. That we have here in outline a description of what actually occurs there can be no doubt. But there is as little doubt that the description is thoroughly inconsistent with Lotze's supposition that the material or data of thought is precisely the same as the antecedent of thought; or that ideas, conceptions, are purely mental somewhats extraneously brought to bear, as the sole essential characteristics of thought, upon a material provided ready-made. It means but one thing: The maintenance of unity and wholeness in experience through conflicting contents occurs by means of a strictly correspondent setting apart of facts to be accurately described and properly related, and meanings to be adequately construed and properly referred. The datum is given in the thought-situation, and to further qualification of ideas or meanings. But even in this aspect it presents a problem. To find out what is given is an inquiry which taxes reflection to the uttermost. Every important advance in scientific method means better agencies, more skilled technique for simply detaching and describing what is barely there, or given. To be able to find out what can safely be taken as there, as given in any particular inquiry, and hence be taken as material for orderly and verifiable inference, for fruitful hypothesis-making, for entertaining of explanatory and interpretative ideas, is one phase of the effort of systematic scientific inquiry. It marks its inductive phase. To take what is discovered to be reliable evidence within a more complex situation as if it were given absolutely and in isolation, or apart from a particular historic situs and context, is the fallacy of empiricism as a logical theory. To regard the thought-forms of conception, judgment, and inference as qualifications of "pure thought, apart from any difference in objects," instead of as successive dispositions in the progressive organization of the material (or objects), is the fallacy of rationalism. Lotze, like Kant, attempts to combine the two, thinking thereby to correct each by the other.