Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/90

Rh 78 PSYCHOLOGY lytic. this material already furnished by the ideational trains. Thought The logical resolution of thought into hierarchies of con- as ana- cepts arranged like Porphyry's tree, into judgments uniting such concepts by means of a logical copula, &c, is the out- come of later reflexion mainly for technical purposes upon thought as a completed product, and entirely pre- supposes all that psychology has to explain. The logical theory of the formation of concepts by generalization (or abstraction) and by determination (or concretion) i.e., by the removal or addition of defining marks assumes the previous existence of the very things to be formed, for these marks or attributes X's and xY's, A's and B's are themselves already concepts. Moreover, the act of gener- alizing or determining is really an act of judgment, so that the logician's account of conception presupposes judgment, while at the same time his account of judgment presup- poses conception. But this is no evil ; for logic does not essay to exhibit the actual genesis of thought but only an ideal for future thinking. Psychologically that is to say, chronologically the judgment is first. The growing mind, we may suppose, passes beyond simple perception when some striking difference in what is at the moment perceived is the occasion of a conflict of presentations (comp. p. 62). The stalking hunter is not instantly recognized as the de- stroying biped, because he crawls on all fours; or the scare- crow looks like him, and yet not like him ; for, though it stands on two legs, it never moves. There is no immedi- ate assimilation : percept and idea remain distinct till, on being severally attended to and compared, what is there is known in spite of the differences. Recognition under such circumstances is in itself a judgment ; but of more account is the further judgment involved in it or accom- panying it that which connects the new fact with the old idea. Though actually complex, as the result of a combination of impressions, generic images are not neces- sarily known as complexes when they first enter into judgments ; as the subjects of such judgments they are but starting-points for predication, It crawls; It does not move; and the like. Such impersonal judgments, according to most philologists, are in fact the earliest; and we may reasonably suppose that by means of them our generic images have been partially analysed, and have attained to something of the distinctness and constancy of logical concepts. But the analysis is rarely complete : a certain confused and fluctuating residuum remains behind. The psychological concept merges at sundry points into those cognate with it, in other words, the continuity of the underlying memory-train still operates ; only the ideal concepts of logic are in all respects totus, teres, atque rotun- dus. Evidence of this, if it seem to any to require proof, is obtainable on all sides, and, if we could recover the first vestiges of thinking, would be more abundant still. Logical But, if we agree that it is through acts of judgment which sue- bias in cessively resolve composite presentations into elements that con- psycho- cepts first arise, it is still very necessary to inquire more carefully what these elements are. On the one side we have seen logicians comparing them to so many letters, and on the other psychologists enumerating the several sensible properties of gold or wax their colour, weight, texture, &c. as instances of such elements. In this way formal logic and sensationalist psychology have been but blind leaders of the blind. Language, which has enabled thought to ad- vance to the level at which reflexion about thought can begin, is now an obstacle in the way of a thorough analysis of it. A child or savage would speak only of " red " and " hot," but we of " redness " and " heat." They would probably say, " Swallows come when the days are lengthening and snipe when they are shortening " ; we say, "Swallows are spring and snipe are winter migrants." In- stead of "The sun shines and plants grow," we should say, "Sun- light is the cause of vegetation." In short, there is a tendency to resolve all concepts into substantive concepts ; and the reason of this is not far to seek. Whether the subject or starting-point of our discursive thinking be actually what we perceive as a thing, or whether it be a quality, an action, an effectuation (i.e., a transi- tive action), a concrete spatial or temporal relation, or finally, a logy. resemblance or difference in these or in other respects, it becomes by the very fact of being the central object of thought pro tanto a unity, and all that can be affirmed concerning it may so far be re- garded as its property or attribute. It is, as we have seen, the characteristic of every completed concept to be a fixed and inde- pendent whole, as it were, crystallized out of the still-fluent matrix of ideas. Moreover, the earliest objects of thought and the earliest concepts must naturally be those of the things that live and move about us ; hence, then to seek no deeper reason for the present this natural tendency, which language by providing distinct names powerfully seconds, to reify or personify not only things but every element and relation of things which we can single out, or, in other words, to concrete our abstracts. 1 It is when things have reached this stage that logic begins. But ordinary, so-called for- mal, logic, which intends to concern itself not with thinking but only with the most general structure of thought, is debarred from recognizing any difference between concepts that does not affect their relations as terms in a proposition. As a consequence it drifts inevitably into that compartmental logic or logic of extension which knows nothing of categories or predicables, but only of the one relation of whole and part qualitatively considered. It thus pushes this reduction to a common denomination to the utmost : its terms, grammatically regarded, are always names and symbolize classes or compartments of things. From this point of view all dis- parity among concepts, save that of contradictory exclusion, and all connexion, save that of partial coincidence, are at an end. Of a piece with this are the logical formula for a simple judgment, X is Y, and the corresponding definitions of judgment as the com- parison of two concepts and the recognition of their agreement or disagreement. 2 It certainly is possible to represent every judg- ment as a comparison, although the term is strictly adequate to only one kind and is often a very artificial description of what actually happens. 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 but to ascertain agreements or disagreements ; and the existence of these, if not necessarily, is at least most evidently represented by spatial rela- tions. 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 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 evi- dent. 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 com- putational logic that psychologists, and especially English psycho- logists, 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 (see LOGIC, vol. xiv. p. 791). If we are still to speak of the elements of thought, we Foi must extend this term so as to include not only the sensory sy 1 elements we are said to receive but three distinct ways in which this pure matter is combined : (1) the forms of intuition, 3 ' Time and Space ; (2) the real categories, Substance, Attribute, State, Act, Effect, End or Purpose, <fec. the exact determination of which is not here in place; and (3) certain formal (logical and mathematical) categories, as Unity, Difference, Identity, Likeness. These can no more be obtained by such a process of abstraction and generalization as logicians and psychologists alike have been wont to describe than the melody could be obtained 1 See Wundt, Logik, i. p. 107 sq., where this process is happily styled " die kategoriale Verschiebung der Begriffe. " 8 Comp. Hamilton: "To judge (icptveiv, judicare) is to recognize the relation of congruence or of confliction in which two concepts, two individual things, or a concept and an individual, compared to- gether, stand to each other" (Lectures on Logic, i. p. 225). 3 As to these it must suffice to refer to what has been already said ; comp. pp. 53 and 64 sq.