Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/407

 394 j. DEWEY: This leads us to recognise that intelligence has a necessary internal permanent content; and that it is only because it has, and because it supplies it to its sense-stimuli, that there ever arises significant experience, and that this occurs just in the degree in which intelligence possesses a synthetic content which it can project into its stimuli. In other words, whether we inquire after the origin or growth of mental experience we find involved a synthetic intelligence, that is to say, an intelligence which possesses a content as opposed to one which is purely formal. Recent Empirical Psychology shows that it has run the circuit and returned to the position of Locke. Locke fitted the mind out with sensations on the one side, and associating comparing activities on the other. These latter were purely formal. They merely operated from without upon the material of sense, dividing and combining. Then Psychology attempted to get along with the sensations only. But it was driven to re-introduce the associating activity, and now we see it driven to bring back the comparing relating activity. We have complaints that the Empirical School has neglected the native reading capacity of the mind, and that we must recognise that it is endowed with the ability to identify and discriminate. But this relating capacity is still conceived as formal, although the conception involves a contradiction. The relations are conceived as superinduced, as it were, upon the material of sensation, introducing ab extra order into them ; instead of as necessary to constitute their entire being as members of conscious experience. When Psy- chology recognises that the relating activity of mind is one not exercised upon sensations, but one which supplies re- lations and thereby makes meaning (makes experience, as Kant said), Psychology will be in a position to explain, and thus to become Philosophy. The mention of Kant's name suggests that both his strength and his weakness lie in the line just mentioned. It is his strength that he recognises that an apperceptive unity interpreting sensations through categories which constitute the synthetic content of self-consciousness is indispensable to experience. It is his weakness that he conceives this content as purely logical and hence as formal. Self-consciousness has a material, a psychological content. Kant was never able to bridge the dualism between his- a priori form and his a posteriori content, because he conceived of sensations as furnishing meaning provided only they were unified by the forms of intuition and the categories of understanding. In truth, the sensations supply no meaning.