Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/497

 THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. 481 realise the thing, and the question occurs whether such a system of concepts as I have described, if it were worked out to completion, would put us in possession of the actual world as it is concrete, real and individual. The view that underlies much of the popular logic and is tacitly admitted in some of the older accounts of the work of thought and knowledge tends to separate between the ideal of science and the concrete individual thing. According to this view thought starts from the concrete reality. Its function is to " abstract " from it, and in doing so to turn its back upon the thing itself. Science and philosophy, it is implied, are well enough, but people who would keep a level head on their shoulders must ever return from these abstractions to the concrete data of sense as the only test of reality. Similarly from the side of individuality. The individual thing or event is supposed to be given within the four corners of its existence as a particular here and now. Thought has nothing to do with its internal consti- tution as a particular thing ; its function, on the contrary, is to go beyond it and connect it from the outside with other things that resemble it in some isolated respect in other words, to generalise it. In this process the thing itself is supposed to remain as it was before ; it is merely set in a new group and viewed in connexion with other things. By means of such groupings intellectual processes are simplified, but no real change has taken place in our idea of the thing itself, or if there has, it is rather for the worse. Its individuality instead of being developed tends to be obscured : to regain it we have to turn our back again on the abstractions of thought, i.e., on the arbitrary relations we have established between it and other things, and view it in the " solid singleness" of its concrete existence. It is hardly necessary at this time of day to say much to discredit this view of the function of thought and the relation of its ideal to reality. Most philosophers now admit within limits that thought has a constitutive as well as a merely formal function with regard to reality. It is admitted, for instance, that in going beyond the thing or the fact as we are forced to do in endeavouring to understand it we are not leaving its individuality behind but carrying it along with us and raising it at each stage of our explanation to a higher power. 1 To revert to the above illustration : to bury ourselves in Prof. Seeley's theories is not to allow the 1 Yet the view in question dies hard. See James, loc. cit. It is the exact parallel in logic to the theory of some people in practice that education and culture make against individuality of character. 31