Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/142

128 the organizing forces of life themselves which they are supposed to be wholly incapable even of representing.

The charge is made against conceptual thinking that it cannot portray life because it cannot portray the continuous. On the contrary, it is the peculiar function of our thought to represent the continuous. Our perceptual intelligence sees things in detached fragments; our conceptual thought integrates them into a continuous whole. I may not be able to see a process but I can think it. In the most conceptual of all processes, the mathematical, there has been devised a method by means of which differential elements, essentially discrete, are capable of integration. While conceptual thought possesses the analytical power of separating a given process into elemental parts, into discrete portions of space, or separate instants of time, it must not be overlooked that it functions also in a synthetic capacity, by means of which the connecting lines of continuity are established so that the mind can hold together the elements in one undivided whole. It not only separates the curve of the ellipse into its differential elements, but those elements in turn it constructs into the continuous curve. The ellipse can be regarded as a point in motion whose direction changes continuously. The conceptual logic is capable, moreover, not only of grasping the fact that there is change such as this, but it can discover and formulate the law of this change. Here the change is uniform, and it might be urged that because it is a mere mechanical process, it can be thus determined and expressed. It is possible, moreover, to determine and express a law where the change is not uniform, but proceeds at an accelerated rate, as the law of falling bodies. Thus we are able to express by our logical processes how change itself changes. Inasmuch as the rate of change is uniform, the varying increment admits of exact formulation. The question however naturally suggests itself at this point: Can vital processes of change be thus formulated? Here the law of change is not apparent. And yet it is a wholly gratuitous assumption that therefore there is no law of change at all; or that, if there is, the changing process is of such an order that our intellects by their very nature are incapable of appreciating it. It is quite as reasonable to suppose that vital processes elude our mental grasp because of their exceeding great