Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/140

126 Logic, it is held, is incapable of interpreting the continuous. It represents finished products but not the processes themselves; it deals with what is, but not with what is becoming. Mr. Underhill expresses this idea in the following paragraph: "Logically the task before the mental evolutionist is the same as that before the biological evolutionist. He must start with the ultimate fact of conscious mind; he must discover the permanent laws of mental processes ...; but here, just as much as in the changes of the inorganic sphere, and as in the vital process of the organic sphere, the actual processes involved, will ipso facto elude his understanding. Mental products and the laws and stages of their production, these constitute his science. The real process is beyond him, the process as it actually goes on in fact."

And in a similar vein, Bergson states, "Notre intelligence, telle qu'elle sort des mains de la nature, a pour objet principal le solide inorganisé. ... L'intelligence ne se represente clairment que le discontinu—" It is urged also that the conceptual intelligence fails to represent adequately the special case. The particular bit of experience, pulsing with life, and warm with a sense of intimate reality, becomes cold and dead when tabulated as an instance and illustration of a universal idea, whose verbal expression has long since become stereotyped, and consequently depotentiated of its full meaning.

Mr. P. N. Waggett, in his "Essay on Darwin and Religious Thought," expresses this criticism of our conceptual processes from the standpoint of religion: "The conception of uniformity which is a necessity of scientific description has been taken for the substance of history. We have accepted a postulate of scientific method as if it were a conclusion of scientific demonstration. In the name of a generalization which, however just on the lines of a particular method, is the prize of a difficult exploit of reflexion, we have discarded the direct impressions of experience; or, perhaps it is more true to say, we have used for the criticism of alleged experiences a doctrine of uniformity which is only valid in the region of abstract science."