Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/515

 THE CONSTITUTION OF THOUGHT. 501 I may just add that I would suggest that something like the germ and spring of the inner development of the science of Number appears when, accepting it as a rule that a certain oounted collection of objects is necessary to the accomplish- ment of some purpose, and having a relatively incomplete group, one considers what further counting out of objects there must yet be to condition the whole group to the desired significance or promise. On the present view of thought I find nothing simpler in the way of thought, as distinguished from instinctive behaviour, about numbers, than the analysis of a given total in subtraction. V. PAST OBLIVION OF CONDITIONAL SIGNIFICANCE. Reliance upon a systematic conditioning is essential to the vigorous growth of our interpretation of objective phases as successive. This, accepted more and more steadily and dis- cerningly as a sure, governing, though ever insensible prin- ciple of our experience, makes for its deliverance from mere higgledy-piggledy phenomenalism. How strange, then, to look back and see near the begin- ning of the history of European reflexion upon general thought, a positive creation of rigid general substances that should save knowledge from disintegration by their very freedom from contingency ! The creation seems to have arisen from a naive fixing of consideration upon severed words out of their vital use. And there is likely to be an abiding difficulty in appreciating the nature of the possible reference of a portion of machinery which we examine by taking it out of its connexion with its highly variable gear. So it would appear that Plato, moving without the direction -of a science long practised in systematic expression, and the far-off but certain paving of ways to practical issues, started, or confirmed, in his Realism, a diversion which Nominalism in its misdirected denial still followed up, and which has marked out the track of the psychological procedure of Ex- perientialism even to our own day. And if ancient philosophy, seizing, with Socrates, upon the sure definability of a general name as affording security for the fixed and reliable character of knowledge, but not there- after proceeding to trace that definability to its roots in a constant social intent in using names, based, again, in the possibility of regulated expectations from objects, exhibits an example of abortion in the development of the theory of thought, modern philosophy may afford us another.