Page:EB1911 - Volume 22.djvu/609

INTELLECTION] disagreement. It certainly is possible to represent every judgment as a comparison, although the term is strictly adequate only to judgments of one kind and affords but a very artificial description of others. But for a logic mainly concerned with inference—i.e. with explicating what is implicated in any given statements concerning classes—there is nothing more to be done than to ascertain agreements or disagreements; and the existence of these, if not necessarily, is at least most evidently represented by spatial relations. Such representation obviously implies a single ground of comparison only and therefore leaves no room for differences of category. The resolution of all concepts into class concepts and that of all judgments into comparisons thus go together. On this view if a concept is complex it can only be so as a class combination; and, if the mode of its synthesis could be taken account of at all, this could only be by treating it too as an element in the combination like the rest: iron is a substance, &c., virtue a quality, &c., distance a relation, &c., and so on. There is much of directly psychological interest in this thoroughgoing reduction of thought to a form which makes its consistency and logical concatenation conspicuously evident. But of the so-called matter of thought it tells us nothing. And, as said, there are many forms in that matter of at least equal moment, both for psychology and for epistemology: these formal logic has tended to keep out of sight.

It has generally been under the bias of such a formal or computational logic that psychologists, and especially English psychologists, have entered upon the study of mind. They have brought with them an analytic scheme which affords a ready place for sensations or “simple ideas” as the elements of thought, but none for any differences in the combinations of these elements. Sensations being in their very nature concrete, all generality becomes an affair of names; and, as Sigwart has acutely remarked, sensationalism and nominalism always go together. History would have borne him out if he had added that a purely formal logic tends in like manner to be nominalistic.

If we are still to speak of the elements of thought, we must extend this term so as to include not only the sensory elements

we are said to receive but three distinct ways in which this pure matter is combined: (1) the forms of intuition—Time and Space ; (2) the real categories—Substance, Attribute, State, Act, Effect, End or Purpose, &c.—the exact determination of which is not here in place; and (3) certain formal (logical and mathematical) categories—as Unity, Difference, Identity, Likeness. These cannot be obtained by such a process of abstraction and generalization as logicians and psychologists alike have been wont to describe. They are not primarily concepts more general than all others in the sense in which animal is more general than man, but rather distinct methods of relating or synthesizing presentations. Kant, though he accepted almost unquestioned the logic and psychology current in his day, has yet been the occasion, in spite of himself, of materially advancing both, and chiefly by the distinction he was led to make between formal and transcendental logic. In his exposition of the latter he brings to light the difference between the “functions of the understanding” in synthesizing—or, as we might say, organizing—percepts into concepts and the merely analytic subsumption of abc and abd under ab—a, b, c and d being what they may. Unlike other concepts, categories as such do not in the first instance signify objects of thought, however general, but these functions of the understanding in constituting objects. In fine, they all imply some special process, and the general characteristic of the resulting products is what we have first of all to note

39. By transposing a tune from one key to another we may obtain two entirely diverse aggregates of notes, and yet the melody may remain unchanged. On the other hand, by varying the order of the notes two distinct tunes may result from the same collection of tones. Sense furnishes merely the parts: whence, then, this identity of the whole in spite of their diversity, this diversity of the whole in spite of their identity? From the sameness or difference of the several “intervals,” it is replied. But the answer is insufficient; for the tune is a unity, not a mere series, and, further, with every interval the same problem recurs.

For the interval, too, is a whole, though a simpler one: it does not necessarily change with a change of its constituents, nor remain the same as long as their distance is unaltered. Feelings and “associations,” again, cannot account for the result, inasmuch as such accompaniments are not invariably present: moreover, they obviously presuppose the melody instead of producing it. Of such complex wholes or combinations—as distinct from mere aggregates or collections—there are many forms; as, for example, geometrical figures and patterns, motions and other changes, numbers, logical connexions, &c. In view of this variety it seems to strike the unprejudiced as wild to expect that “the progress of psychophysics” may disclose an explanation of such combinations conforming to the old scholastic maxim, Nihil est in intellectu quad non fuerit prius in sensu. Yet hopes of such a generatio aequivoca are entertained! Meanwhile the “old psychology,” at any rate, is content to regard such complex wholes as new presentations, the products, that is to say, not of a quasi-mechanical interaction of their constituents, but of intellectual synthesis.

What is here said of the combinations whereby the items of an aggregate are construed as parts of a whole holds equally of the comparisons whereby such items are related, as like or unlike, compatible or incompatible. Before either combination or comparison is possible, such items or particulars must be “given.” But it is conceivable that they should be given and no intellectual synthesis ensue; such a consciousness has been happily named anoetic. Whether or no it actually exists is another matter: it is a conceivable limit, and has the theoretical usefulness of limiting conceptions generally. But relative anoesis suffices here. Suppose, then, we have: (a) item, a sound; item, ditto; item, ditto; or (b) item, blue; item, green. The sensationalist, from Hume onwards, has complained that he does not find in the one case a further item: total three; nor in the other a further item: unlikeness. After vainly seeking the living whole among the dead particulars, he next surmises that they generate it by their conjoint action! But whence this notion of “action”; and how, if such disjecta membra suffice, do they so often fail of their effect, so that we cannot “see the wood for the trees”? Combinations and comparisons then, we conclude, are not given, but “grounded” on what is given, and is thus their fundamentum. Hence Meinong, who has studied the psychology of intellection with especial care, has called the new presentations, due to this process of “grounding” (Fundiren), “objects of a higher order,” or ideal objects. They have validity in respect of the particulars on which they are grounded, but not reality as data existing for perception alongside of such particulars.

The reader will here be reminded of Hume's distinction between knowledge and probability. His four philosophical relations, “which, depending solely upon ideas, can be the objects of knowledge and certainty—resemblance, continuity, degrees in quality an proportions in quantity or number”—are objects of higher order and ideal. “The other three, which depend not upon the idea, and may be absent or present even while that remains the same”—namely, identity, the situations in time and place, and causation—are thus obviously not the result of grounding or noesis merely, are not ideal but empirical, and have, that is to say, existential import. In fact, the second of these, the situations, though they imply synthesis in the wider sense in which all complex perception does, do not involve intellectual synthesis at all: are neither ideal combinations nor ideal relations. And since such temporal and spatial situations enter into both the other two—numerical identity and causation—the mixed, a posteriori character of these is obvious. Whatever be the defects of Hume's psychology, his classification of relations is so far sound, and its epistemological importance can hardly be overrated. It is accordingly to be regretted that the one vague term “relation” does not allow us to make these distinctions more precise. The German language, with the two terms Verhältniss and Beziehung, can do more.