Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/68

54 recently published two volumes (with a third soon to follow) of a work entitled Thought and Things, or Genetic Logic. The author claims a certain advance in standpoint and method over the older logical discussions in virtue of the more genuinely genetic character of the concepts with which he has approached his inquiry. While conceding that Hegel and the neo-Kantian logicians generally employ a method that is to some extent genetic, Professor Baldwin finds that the treatment even of writers like Bosanquet, who have come nearest to grasping the nature of the logical process as genetic, is still defective and vitiated by formalism and appeals to the potential. In view of this claim to a more adequate method of dealing with logical experience, it was important that Professor Baldwin should explain and defend the conceptions which were to guide his procedure, as he has done to some extent, at the beginning of his work. Here in particular we learn how it is necessary to interpret the logical series when conceived as genetic, or what the concept of a genetic series really implies. These pages, read in conjunction with some of the author's earlier writings which deal with the same topic, furnish a valuable and most suggestive treatment of fundamental logical problems; and here one must go in order to understand and estimate his claim to have gained a more concrete and fruitful point of view than that of the older writers. In thus trying to understand Professor Baldwin's working concepts, one finds in the list of canons of genetic logic, the canon of Actuality, which says that "no psychic event is present unless it be actual," and whose violation gives rise to the fallacy of the Implicit or Potential. This fallacy, we are told, "consists in treating something as implicitly or potentially present when it is not actual." And the illustrations given are "the finding of logical process in the prelogical modes or a potential self in the impersonal modes." What is to be the criterion of presence or absence in the mind is not made clear in this connection, but, from the general form of his statements, as welt as from other passages in his writings, it seems fair to assume that Professor Baldwin regards as actual only what is capable of