Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/513

 THE CONSTITUTION OF THOUGHT. 499 thought that advances, to take a stand higher and higher up the stream of conditionality to seize on S's where the contingency of their practical issue is richer, and the open possibilities more numerous. If, then, we reserve the symbol P just now to represent terms of proximate practical sug- gestion, we may symbolise the new kind of statement attained ' by ' S' is M '. It will be observed that if M can be P or P ? , the practical bearing of ' S' is M ' is to that extent open and uncommitted. But if the thinker advance to a statement ' S" is Mj', 1 from which, by way of ' M 5 is M 4 ,' ' M 4 is M 3 ,' etc., a connexion with one P may be reached, from which also, by way of ' M 5 is M' 4 ' 2 and so on, a quite different volition-directing P may be reached still others by routes of which ' MS is M 4 ' followed now by ' M 4 is M' 3 ' 3 may be a sufficient suggestion the possible practical motives which make it rational to say ' S" is M 5 ' may be getting buried out of sight for the speaker. But how when we begin to predi- cate M's so remote from practical decisiveness that we may fitly style them M w 's ? The Protean character of their prac- tical relations forms a disguise so baffling, it appears, as to have had the effect of invisibility itself. To bring an utterance, then, to some obviously practical issue might mean bringing its quota of influence forward and still forward along any one of innumerable variously ramifying possibilities of other, but connected, prepositional statement. The possibilities of practical issue attaching to many valuable propositions may thus be left, by them, so wide and undetermined, that it is little wonder if we have fashioned our logics as though it were indifferent whether a proposition ultimately had some possible practical refer- ence or not. Yet if there could be a proposition with none, I think it would stand outside any system of propositions logically normal a trifling example of intellectual vagary or sport. The disguise may be expected to be deep under those cir- cumstances in which we keep significance suspended, and avoid unconstitutional references to foreign conditionings of ulterior and subserved significances, on pain of expulsion from the realm of Pure Mathematics. 1 A fifth middle term away from a " P ". We omit the consideration, in this quasi-diagrammatic treatment, that it might be the second or the hundredth from another " P ". 2 M 4 and M' 4 mean that there may be two " fourth " middles between an M 5 and a term of defined practical suggestion. 3 Following our first route for one stage, and then branching off on a route differing both from that and from the second.