Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/71

57 I think, be denied that Professor Baldwin's protest is directed at a real abuse; and to fail to acknowledge that there may be some grounds for his criticism would be to forget that abstraction is an easily besetting sin. To think of the implicit as a preformed somewhat, actually existing in the earlier cognitive experience, and naturally unfolding ex vi propria, and to suppose that a general reference to this natural tendency of the implicit to become explicit is a sufficient explanation of the real process is, of course, to rest in the emptiest verbal abstractions. As is at once obvious, it is the standpoint of the older preformationism, and not properly a genetic view at all.

But, granting that a genetic account of logic must avoid both an atomistic and a preformation view of knowledge, the question still remains: How is the continuity of experience to be conceived? In what terms are we to think of the relation of the different stages and modes of knowledge, and what is the nature of the "one continuous function of cognition," to which Professor Baldwin in more than one passage refers? The answer to these questions is undoubtedly to be found in a conception which will adequately express the nature of a genetic logical series. In his canon of Progression, as well as in the later essays in his volume, Development and Evolution, Professor Baldwin has distinguished between a genetic and an agenetic series, and between genetic and agenetic sciences. In these discussions, accordingly, we may expect to get additional light regarding the positive character of his working conceptions. The fundamental distinction between a genetic series and one that is agenetic or mechanical, is that in the former there is real progression or development. Something new appears which was not present in the earlier stages, and which cannot be explained as made up of, or caused by, the events which preceded it. The genetic series, consequently, is not reversible like the mechanical, where cause and effect are taken as identical in virtue of the fact that they represent