Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/608

578 schools would be to say that they seek to explain the forms of consciousness by means of its materials.

Now, to another class of minds any such attempt seems so preposterously absurd that they pour out the child with the bath, and disdain even a modest ambition which should content itself with tracing out in the jungle of the mind a few of the trails by which its materials are brought together. As this article is born of the latter ambition, and as its author thinks he has succeeded in making the trails broader and smoother than previous writers have left them, it behooves him to defend himself and his purpose by a few preliminary words addressed to this class of critics. They are recruited mainly from the school of Hegel, but we find even as fertile and acute a writer as Lotze sharing their prejudices and negations in this respect.

The intuition they start from is that thought is not a sand-heap of juxtaposed images with associating links outside of them and between them. It is a unitary continuum of which the items, and the logical relations between the items, form alike integral parts, equally imbedded, equally essential, equally interdependent. Any relation may carry us from one item to another, and according as we follow one or the other relation we shall traverse the field of thought in this way or in that, have one train of images or its opposite. But all the relations are logical, are relations of reason. A thing may suggest its like, or its opposite, its genus or its species, its cause or its effect, its means or its purpose, its habitual neighbors in space or in time, its possibilities or its impossibilities, its changes or its resistance to change—in short, it may call up every consideration to which it can have a possible logical relevancy, and call up each in its turn. And the only summary formula that can be applied to all these infinite possibilities of transition is that, as transitions of Thought, they are all alike acts of Reason. This monotonous appeal to "Thought" with a capital T and Reason with a capital R is apt to irritate the ear of him bent on analysis, very much as the stereotyped "Allah is great" of the Mussulman irritates the ear of the scientific traveler. It is true enough, but sterile. And, when it interdicts discrimination and the search for secondary causes, it performs as obstructive a function as that of our dear old friend the dog in the manger.

For these so-called "transitions of Reason" are far from being all alike reasonable. If pure Thought runs all our trains, why should she run some so fast and some so slow, some through dull flats and some through gorgeous scenery, some to mountain-heights and jeweled mines, others through dismal swamps and darkness?—and run some off the track altogether, and into the wilderness of lunacy? Why do we spend years straining after a certain scientific or practical problem, but all in vain—Thought refusing to evoke the solution we desire? And why, some day, walking in the street with our attention miles away from that quest, does the answer saunter into our minds as