I am not here concerned with trying to demonstrate that this is the correct mode of interpretation. I am only concerned with pointing out its radical difference from the view of a critic who, holding to the two-world theory of existences which from the start are divided into the fixedly objective and the fixedly psychical, interprets in terms of his own theory the view that the distinction between the objective and the subjective is a logical-practical distinction. Whether the logical, as against the ontological, theory be true or false, it can hardly be fruitfully discussed without a preliminary apprehension of it as a logical conception.

VIII
THE CONTROL OF IDEAS BY FACTS

I

There is something a little baffling in much of the current discussion regarding the reference of ideas to facts. The not uncommon assumption is that there was a satisfactory and consistent theory of their relation in existence prior to the somewhat impertinent intrusion of a functional and practical interpretation of them. The way the instrumental logician has been turned upon by both idealist and realist is suggestive of the way in which the outsider who intervenes in a family jar is proverbially treated by both husband and wife, who manifest their unity by berating the third party.

I feel that the situation is due partly to various misapprehensions, inevitable perhaps in the first presentation of a new point of view[52] and multiplied in this instance by the coincidence of the presentation of this logical point of view with that of the larger philosophical movements, humanism and pragmatism. I wish here to undertake a summary statement of the logical view on its own account, hoping it may receive clearer understanding on its own merits.

In the first place it was (apart from the frightful confusion of logical theories) precisely the lack of an adequate and generally accepted theory of the nature of fact and idea, and of the kind of agreement or correspondence between them which constitutes the truth of the idea, that led to the development of a functional theory of logic. A brief statement of the difficulties in the traditional views may therefore be pertinent. That fruitful thinking—thought that terminates in valid knowledge—goes on in terms of the distinction of facts and judgment, and that valid knowledge is precisely genuine correspondence or agreement, of some sort, of fact and judgment, is the common and undeniable assumption. But the discussions are largely carried on in terms of an epistemological dualism, rendering the solution of the problem impossible in virtue of the very terms in which it is stated. The distinction is at once identified with that between mind and matter, consciousness and objects, the psychical and the physical, where each of these terms is supposed to refer to some fixed order of existence, a world in itself. Then, of course, there comes up the question of the nature of the agreement, and of the recognition of it. What is the experience in which the survey of both idea and existence is made and their agreement recognized? Is it an idea? Is the agreement ultimately a matter of self-consistency of ideas? Then what has become of the postulate that truth is agreement of idea with existence beyond idea? Is it an absolute which transcends and absorbs the difference? Then, once more, what is the test of any specific judgment? What has become of the correspondence of fact and thought? Or, more urgently, since the pressing problem of life, of practice and of science, is the discrimination of the relative, or superior, validity of this or that theory, plan, or interpretation, what is the criterion of truth within present non-absolutistic experience, where the distinction between factual conditions and thoughts and the necessity of some working adjustment persist?

Putting the problem in yet another way, either both fact and idea are present all the time or else only one of them is present. But if the former, why should there be an idea at all, and why should it have to be tested by the fact? When we already have what we want, namely, existence, reality, why should we take up the wholly supernumerary task of forming more or less imperfect ideas of those facts, and then engage in the idle performance of testing them by what we already know to be? But if only ideas are present, it is idle to speak of comparing an idea with facts and testing its validity by its agreement. The elaboration and refinement of ideas to the uttermost still leaves us with an idea, and while a self-consistent idea stands a show of being true in a way in which an incoherent one does not, a self-consistent idea is still but a hypothesis, a candidate for truth. Ideas are not made true by getting bigger. But if only 'facts' are present, the whole conception of agreement is once more given up—not to mention that such a situation is one in which there is by definition no thinking or reflective factor at all.