Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/562

 548 CEITICAL NOTICES : ticular content which is believed or doubted, as it is legitimate to study the psychological character of an emotion, like anger, without reference to the questions, what the anger is about, or whether it is justifiable. From this point of view, a distinction between the content of belief (the ' Propositions ') as either true or false, and, on the other side, belief as neither true nor false but simply a psycho- logical attitude towards true and false propositions, is surely defen- sible. But it is undoubtedly another question, whether the distinction can be made the basis of a satisfactory logical or metaphysical theory. 1 And this leads me to another remark. To reserve the predicates ' true ' and ' false ' for the contents of belief, but to deny them to the belief itself, is at least a possible position to take up. But it seems to me to make for nothing but hopeless confusion to dis- tinguish between the ' truth ' of our belief, or truth ' as we appre- hend it,' and the ' truth ' of the content of belief, or truth ' as it really is,' whatever we may believe. And the matter is made still worse, if the truth of the belief is then explained by its ' correspondence ' to the objective truth, or if, by a further refinement, the true belief is distinguished from our awareness of its truth, i.e., of its correspond- ence to objective truth. I draw attention to this confusion because it is clearly present in such a passage as this : ' Truth is clearly independent. It has its own stubborn nature, to which our think- ing must conform on pain of failure, i.e., error. ... It is to this independent entity that the judgment of this or that person must conform if he is to attain truth. Correspondence of his thinking with this ' reality ' is truth for him ; but such correspondence re- quires an independent truth as one of its factors and is not itself 1 The meaning of ' Psychology ' is so vague that I fear ray plea for a separation of Logic from Psychology may be misunderstood. As must be clear from my description, the psychology which can abstract from the particular contents of belief, etc., deals merely with the general characteristics of certain classes of psychical phenomena. It is of a highly abstract kind. As soon as we come to deal with any concrete thought -process, it is impossible to neglect its content, and therefore impossible to keep the psychological and the logical point of view apart. On this point I heartily agree with Mr. Joachim (p. 179). For though, even here, it is still possible to distinguish abstractly the reasons why we believe a certain view to be true and the reasons why it is true, the dis- tinction is mainly useful for those cases in which the reasons for belief are logically inadequate. But where a true view is held with full insight into the reasons of its truth, there surely all ground for the distinction has disappeared. This I take to be the meaning of the doctrine that Logic is ' more concrete ' than Psychology. Logical affirmation, one might say, is psychological belief which is fully conscious of the adequacy of its own reasons. By the way, surely the much-maligned Pragmatists deserve some credit for their insistence on the close relation of Psycho- logy and Logic, though they differ from others as to the kind of reasons that they regard as relevant to an affirmation of truth.