Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/75

61 of its ideal meaning or representative function, is not an independent and detached mode of existence, but a necessary moment of the same system, and therefore implicitly identical with the end itself. When thus interpreted teleologically, the different stages of the developing process are not taken as something new and inexplicable, but are explained as essential moments in the process through which the end is realized.

We may, then, emphasize the continuity of the process of cognition by describing it as one continuous function which is exhibited throughout its various modes and stages. This would mean that all the various functions of logical experience are subordinated as means to the ends of some supreme function or unity. This function of unity in experience is, as Kant showed in his doctrine of the Unity of Apperception, the logical mind itself. Moreover, it is evident that any particular category or mode of experience is just the logical mind functioning at that stage. When we take the logical mind itself as the one continuous function, and think of experience as a process of development, we can express in somewhat different terms the relation of the implicit and the actual in experience. The undeveloped logical mind is not merely universal capacity or potentiality of knowing, but also a movement toward actuality. Its real nature consists, one may say, in its striving for meaning, in its demand for completeness and coherence of experience. The ends of the logical process, the demand for meaning, which is the essential nature of the logical mind, is functionally operative at every stage of development, so that each prior stage of experience, as representative of those ends, is connected through identity with the later. Or, in other words, the Implicit is just the logical mind, as expressed at every stage in the system of developing functions through which the ends of knowledge are realized. As the bearer of the logical idea, as the instrument of the logical end, each functional stage is, as we have seen, a universal, and thus linked through identity to the other functions. In this sense the genetic process is continuous, exhibiting in its progression not merely 'something new,' but rather the development or realization of the ends which constitute the logical mind. The 'logical mind' is thus the