Studies in Logical Theory

So far it seems clear sailing. Difficulties, however, show themselves, the moment we inquire what is meant by a self-identical content for all thought. Is this to be taken in a static or in a dynamic way? That is to say: Does it express the fact that a given content or meaning is de facto presented to the consciousness of all alike? Does this coequal presence guarantee an objectivity? Or does validity attach to a given meaning or content in so far as it directs and controls the further exercise of thinking, and thus the formation of further new contents of consciousness?

The former interpretation is alone consistent with Lotze's notion that the independent idea as such is invested with a certain validity or objectivity. It alone is consistent with his assertion that concepts precede judgments. It alone, that is to say, is consistent with the notion that reflective thinking has a sphere of ideas or meanings supplied to it at the outset. But it is impossible to entertain this belief. The stimulus which, according to Lotze, goads thought on from ideas or concepts to judgments and inferences, is in truth simply the lack of validity, of objectivity in its original independent meanings or contents. A meaning as independent is precisely that which is not invested with validity, but which is a mere idea, a "notion," a fancy, at best a surmise which may turn out to be valid (and of course this indicates possible reference); a standpoint to have its value determined by its further active use. "Blue" as a mere detached floating meaning, an idea at large, would not gain in validity simply by being entertained continuously in a given consciousness; or by being made at one and the same time the persistent object of attentive regard by all human consciousnesses. If this were all that were required, the chimera, the centaur, or any other subjective construction, could easily gain validity. "Christian Science" has made just this notion the basis of its philosophy.

The simple fact is that in such illustrations as "blue," "franchise," "conjunction," Lotze instinctively takes cases which are not mere independent and detached meanings, but which involve reference to a region of cosmic experience, or to a region of mutually determining social activities. The conception that reference to a social activity does not involve the same sort of reference of thought beyond itself that is involved in physical matters, and hence may be taken quite innocent and free of the metaphysical problem of reference to reality beyond meaning, is one of the strangest that has ever found lodgment in human thinking. Either both physical and social reference or neither, is metaphysical; if neither, then it is because the meaning functions, as it originates, in a specific situation which carries with it its own tests (see p. 17). Lotze's conception is made possible only by unconsciously substituting the idea of object as content of thought for a large number of persons (or a de facto somewhat for every consciousness), for the genuine definition of object as a determinant in a scheme of experience. The former is consistent with Lotze's conception of thought, but wholly indeterminate as to validity or intent. The latter is the test used experimentally in all concrete thinking, but involves a radical transformation of all Lotze's assumptions. A given idea of the conjunction of the franchise, or of blue, is valid, not because everybody happens to entertain it, but because it expresses the factor of control or direction in a given movement of experience. The test of validity of idea[39] is its functional or instrumental use in effecting the transition from a relatively conflicting experience to a relatively integrated one. If Lotze's view were correct, "blue" valid once would be valid always—even when red or green were actually called for to fulfil specific conditions. This is to say validity always refers to rightfulness or adequacy of performance in an asserting of connection—not to the meaning as detached and contemplated.

If we refer again to the fact that the genuine antecedent of thought is a situation which is tensional as regards its existing status, or disorganized in its structural elements, yet organized as emerging out of the unified experience of the past and as striving as a whole, or equally in all its phases, to reinstate an experience harmonized in make-up, we can easily understand how certain contents may be detached and held apart as meanings or references, actual or possible (according as they are viewed with reference to the past or to the future). We can understand how such detached contents may be of use in effecting a review of the entire experience, and as affording standpoints and methods of a reconstruction which will maintain the integrity of experience. We can understand how validity of meaning is measured by reference to something which is not mere meaning; by reference to something which lies beyond the idea as such—viz., the reconstitution of an experience into which thought enters as mediator. That paradox of ordinary experience and of scientific inquiry by which objectivity is given alike to matter of perception and to conceived relations—to facts and to laws—affords no peculiar difficulty, because we see that the test of objectivity is everywhere the same: anything is objective in so far as, through the medium of conflict, it controls the movement of experience in its reconstructive transition from one unified form to another. There is not first an object, whether of sense-perception or of conception, which afterward somehow exercises this controlling influence; but the objective is such in virtue of the exercise of function of control. It may only control the act of inquiry; it may only set on foot doubt, but this is direction of subsequent experience, and, in so far, is a token of objectivity.

So much for the thought-content or meaning as having a validity of its own. It does not have it as isolated or given or static; it has it in its dynamic reference, its use in determining further movement of experience. In other words, the "meaning" or idea as such, having been selected and made-up with reference to performing a certain office in the evolution of a unified experience, can be tested in no other way than by discovering whether it does what it was intended to do and what it purports to do.[40]

2. Lotze has to wrestle with this question of validity in a further aspect: What constitutes the objectivity of thinking as a total attitude, activity, or function? According to his own statement, the meanings or valid ideas are after all only building-stones for logical thought. Validity is thus not a question of them in their independent existences, but of their mutual reference to each other. Thinking is the process of instituting these mutual references; of building up the various scattered and independent building-stones into the coherent system of thought. What is the validity of the various forms of thinking which find expression in the various types of judgment and in the various forms of inference? Categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive judgment; inference by induction, by analogy, by mathematical equation; classification, theory of explanation—all these are processes of reflection by which mutual connection in an individualized whole is given to the fragmentary meanings or ideas with which thought as it sets out is supplied. What shall we say of the validity of such processes?

On one point Lotze is quite clear. These various logical acts do not really enter into the constitution of the valid world. The logical forms as such are maintained only in the process of thinking. The world of valid truth does not undergo a series of contortions and evolutions, paralleling in any way the successive steps and missteps, the succession of tentative trials, withdrawals, and retracings, which mark the course of our own thinking.[41]

Lotze is explicit upon the point that it is only the thought-content in which the process of thinking issues that has objective validity; the act of thinking is "purely and simply an inner movement of our own minds, made necessary to us by reason of the constitution of our nature and of our place in the world" (Vol. II, p. 279).

Here the problem of validity presents itself as the problem of the relation of the act of thinking to its own product. In his solution Lotze uses two metaphors: one derived from building operations, the other from traveling. The construction of a building requires of necessity certain tools and extraneous constructions, stagings, scaffoldings, etc., which are necessary to effect the final construction, but yet which do not enter into the building as such. The activity has an instrumental, though not a constitutive, value as regards its product. Similarly, in order to get a view from the top of a mountain—this view being the objective—the traveler has to go through preliminary movements along devious courses. These again are antecedent prerequisites, but do not constitute a portion of the attained view.

The problem of thought as activity, as distinct from thought as content, opens up altogether too large a question to receive complete consideration at this point. Fortunately, however, the previous discussion enables us to narrow the point which is in issue just here. It is once more the question whether the activity of thought is to be regarded as an independent function supervening entirely from without upon antecedents, and directed from without upon data; or whether it marks merely a phase of the transformation which the course of experience (whether practical, or artistic, or socially affectional or whatever) undergoes in entering into a tensional status where the maintenance of its harmony of content is problematic and hence an aim. If it be the latter, a thoroughly intelligent sense can be given to the proposition that the activity of thinking is instrumental, and that its worth is found, not in its own successive states as such, but in the result in which it comes to conclusion. But the conception of thinking as an independent activity somehow occurring after an independent antecedent, playing upon an independent subject-matter, and finally effecting an independent result, presents us with just one miracle the more.

I do not question the strictly instrumental character of thinking. The problem lies not here, but in the interpretation of the nature of the organ and instrument. The difficulty with Lotze's position is that it forces us into the assumption of a means and an end which are simply and only external to each other, and yet necessarily dependent upon each other—a position which, whenever found, is so thoroughly self-contradictory as to necessitate critical reconsideration of the premises which lead to it. Lotze vibrates between the notion of thought as a tool in the external sense, a mere scaffolding to a finished building in which it has no part nor lot, and the notion of thought as an immanent tool, as a scaffolding which is an integral part of the very operation of building, and set up for the sake of the building-activity which is carried on effectively only with and through a scaffolding. Only in the former case can the scaffolding be considered as a mere tool. In the latter case the external scaffolding is not itself the instrumentality; the actual tool is the action of erecting the building, and this action involves the scaffolding as a constituent part of itself. The work of erecting is not set over against the completed building as mere means to an end; it is the end taken in process or historically, longitudinally viewed. The scaffolding, moreover, is not an external means to the process of erecting, but an organic member of it. It is no mere accident of language that "building" has a double sense—meaning at once the process and the finished product. The outcome of thought is the thinking activity carried on to its own completion; the activity, on the other hand, is the outcome taken anywhere short of its own realization, and thereby still going on.

The only consideration which prevents easy and immediate acceptance of this view is the notion of thinking as something purely formal. It is strange that the empiricist does not see that his insistence upon a matter extraneously given to thought only strengthens the hands of the rationalist with his claim of thinking as an independent activity, separate from the actual make-up of the affairs of experience. Thinking as a merely formal activity exercised upon certain sensations or images or objects sets forth an absolutely meaningless proposition. The psychological identification of thinking with the process of association is much nearer the truth. It is, indeed, on the way to the truth. We need only to recognize that association is of contents or matters or meanings, not of ideas as bare existences or events; and that the type of association we call thinking differs from the associations of casual fancy and revery in an element of control by reference to an end which determines the fitness and thus the selection of the associates, to apprehend how completely thinking is a reconstructive movement of actual contents of experience in relation to each other, and for the sake of a redintegration of a conflicting experience.

There is no miracle in the fact that tool and material are adapted to each other in the process of reaching a valid conclusion. Were they external in origin to each other and to the result, the whole affair would, indeed, present an insoluble problem—so insoluble that, if this were the true condition of affairs, we never should even know that there was a problem. But, in truth, both material and tool have been secured and determined with reference to economy and efficiency in effecting the end desired—the maintenance of a harmonious experience. The builder has discovered that his building means building tools, and also building material. Each has been slowly evolved with reference to its fit employ in the entire function; and this evolution has been checked at every point by reference to its own correspondent. The carpenter has not thought at large on his building and then constructed tools at large, but has thought of his building in terms of the material which enters into it, and through that medium has come to the consideration of the tools which are helpful. Life proposes to maintain at all hazards the unity of its own process. Experience insists on being itself, on securing integrity even through and by means of conflict.

This is not a formal question, but one of the placing and relations of the matters or values actually entering into experience. And this in turn determines the taking up of just those mental attitudes, and the employing of just those intellectual operations, which most effectively handle and organize the material. Thinking is adaptation to an end through the adjustment of particular objective contents.

The thinker, like the carpenter, is at once stimulated and checked in every stage of his procedure by the particular situation which confronts him. A person is at the stage of wanting a new house: well then, his materials are available resources, the price of labor, the cost of building, the state and needs of his family, profession, etc.; his tools are paper and pencil and compass, or possibly the bank as a credit instrumentality, etc. Again, the work is beginning. The foundations are laid. This in turn determines its own specific materials and tools. Again, the building is almost ready for occupancy. The concrete process is that of taking away the scaffolding, clearing up the grounds, furnishing and decorating rooms, etc. This specific operation again determines its own fit or relevant materials and tools. It defines the time and mode and manner of beginning and ceasing to use them. Logical theory will get along as well as does reflective practice, when it sticks close by and observes the directions and checks inherent in each successive phase of the evolution of the cycle of experiencing. The problem in general of validity of the thinking process as distinct from the validity of this or that process arises only when thinking is isolated from its historic position and its material context.

3. But Lotze is not yet done with the problem of validity, even from his own standpoint. The ground shifts again under his feet. It is no longer a question of the validity of the idea or meaning with which thought is supposed to set out; it is no longer a question of the validity of the process of thinking in reference to its own product; it is the question of the validity of the product. Supposing, after all, that the final meaning, or logical idea, is thoroughly coherent and organized; supposing it is an object for all consciousness as such. Once more arises the question: What is the validity of even the most coherent and complete idea?—a question which rises and will not down. We may reconstruct our notion of the chimera until it ceases to be an independent idea and becomes a part of the system of Greek mythology. Has it gained in validity in ceasing to be an independent myth, in becoming an element in systematized myth? Myth it was and myth it remains. Mythology does not get validity by growing bigger. How do we know the same is not the case with the ideas which are the product of our most deliberate and extended scientific inquiry? The reference again to the content as the self-identical object of all consciousness proves nothing; the matter of a hallucination does not gain worth in proportion to its social contagiousness. Or the reference proves that we have not as yet reached any conclusion, but are entertaining a hypothesis—since social validity is not a matter of mere common content, but of securing participation in a commonly adjudged social experience through action directed thereto and directed by consensus of judgment.

According to Lotze, the final product is, after all, still thought. Now, Lotze is committed once for all to the notion that thought, in any form, is directed by and at an outside reality. The ghost haunts him to the last. How, after all, does even the ideally perfect valid thought apply or refer to reality? Its genuine subject is still beyond itself. At the last Lotze can dispose of this question only by regarding it as a metaphysical, not a logical, problem (Vol. II, pp. 281, 282). In other words, logically speaking, we are at the end just exactly where we were at the beginning—in the sphere of ideas, and of ideas only, plus a consciousness of the necessity of referring these ideas to a reality which is beyond them, which is utterly inaccessible to them, which is out of reach of any influence which they may exercise, and which transcends any possible comparison with their results. "It is vain," says Lotze, "to shrink from acknowledging the circle here involved ... all we know of the external world depends upon the ideas of it which are within us" (Vol. II, p. 185). "It is then this varied world of ideas within us which forms the sole material directly given to us" (Vol. II, p. 186). As it is the only material given to us, so it is the only material with which thought can end. To talk about knowing the external world through ideas which are merely within us is to talk of an inherent self-contradiction. There is no common ground in which the external world and our ideas can meet. In other words, the original implication of a separation between an independent thought-material and an independent thought-function and purpose lands us inevitably in the metaphysics of subjective idealism, plus a belief in an unknown reality beyond, which unknowable is yet taken as the ultimate test of the value of our ideas as just subjective. The subjectivity of the psychical event infects at the last the meaning or ideal object. Because it has been taken to be something "in itself," thought is also something "in itself," and at the end, after all our maneuvering we are where we began:—with two separate disparates, one of meaning, but no existence, the other of existence, but no meaning.

The other aspect of Lotze's contradiction which completes the circle is clear when we refer to his original propositions, and recall that at the outset he was compelled to regard the origination and conjunctions of the impressions, the elements of ideas, as themselves the effects exercised by a world of things already in existence (see p. 31). He sets up an independent world of thought, and yet has to confess that both at its origin and termination it points with absolute necessity to a world beyond itself. Only the stubborn refusal to take this initial and terminal reference of thought beyond itself as having a historic meaning, indicating a particular place of generation and a particular point of fulfilment in the drama of evolving experience, compels Lotze to give such bifold objective reference a purely metaphysical turn.

When Lotze goes on to say (Vol. II, p. 191) that the measure of truth of particular parts of experience is found in asking whether, when judged by thought, they are in harmony with other parts of experience; when he goes on to say that there is no sense in trying to compare the entire world of ideas with a reality which is non-existent, excepting as it itself should become an idea, Lotze lands where he might better have frankly commenced.[43] He saves himself from utter skepticism only by claiming that the explicit assumption of skepticism, the need of agreement of a ready-made idea as such, with an extraneous independent material as such, is meaningless. He defines correctly the work of thought as consisting in harmonizing the various portions of experience with each other: a definition which has meaning only in connection with the fact that experience is continually integrating itself into a wholeness of coherent meaning deepened in significance by passing through an inner distraction in which by means of conflict certain contents are rendered partial and hence objectively conscious. In this case the test of thought is the harmony or unity of experience actually effected. In that sense the test of reality is beyond thought, as thought, just as at the other limit thought originates out of a situation which is not reflectional in character. Interpret this before and beyond in a historic sense, as an affair of the place occupied and rôle played by thinking as a function in experience in relation to other functions, and the intermediate and instrumental character of thought, its dependence upon unreflective antecedents for its existence, and upon a consequent experience for its test of final validity, becomes significant and necessary. Taken at large, it plunges us in the depths of a hopelessly complicated and self-revolving metaphysic.

V

A CRITICAL STUDY OF BOSANQUET'S THEORY OF
JUDGMENT[44]

Bosanquet's theory of the judgment, in common with all such theories of the judgment, necessarily involves the metaphysical problem of the nature of reality and of the relation of thought to reality. That the judgment is the function by which knowledge is attained is a proposition which would meet with universal acceptance. But knowledge is itself a relation of some sort between thought and reality. The view which any logician adopts as to the nature of the knowledge-process is accordingly conditioned by his metaphysical presuppositions as to the nature of reality. It is equally true that the theory of the judgment developed from any metaphysical standpoint serves as a test of the validity of that standpoint. We shall attempt in the present paper to show how Bosanquet's theory of the judgment develops from his view of the nature of reality, and to inquire whether the theory succeeds in giving such an account of the knowledge-process as to corroborate the presupposition underlying it.

Bosanquet defines judgment as "the intellectual function which defines reality by significant ideas and in so doing affirms the reality of those ideas" (p. 104).[45] The form of the definition suggests the nature of his fundamental problem. There is, on the one hand, a world of reality which must be regarded as having existence outside of and independently of the thoughts or ideas we are now applying to it; and there is, on the other hand, a world of ideas whose value is measured by the possibility of applying them to reality, of qualifying reality by them. The judgment is the function which makes the connection between these two worlds. If judgment merely brought one set of ideas into relation with another set, then it could never give us anything more than purely hypothetical knowledge whose application to the real world would remain forever problematic. It would mean that knowledge is impossible, a result which seems to be contradicted by the existence of knowledge. The logician must, therefore, as Bosanquet tells us, regard it as an essential of the act of judgment that it always refers to a reality which goes beyond and is independent of the act itself (p. 104). His central problem thus becomes that of understanding what the nature of reality is which permits of being defined by ideas, and what the nature of an idea is that it can ever be affirmed to be real. How does the real world get representation in experience, and what is the guarantee that the representation, when obtained, is correct?

The defining of the problem suggests the view of the nature of reality out of which Bosanquet's theory of the judgment grows. The real world is to him a world which has its existence quite independently of the process by which it is known. The real world is there to be known, and is in no wise modified by the knowledge which we obtain of it. The work of thought is to build up a world of ideas which shall represent, or correspond to, the world of reality. The more complete and perfect the correspondence, the greater our store of knowledge.

Translated into terms of the judgment, this representational view means that the subject of the judgment must always be reality, while the predicate is an idea. But when we examine the content of any universal judgment, or even of an ordinary judgment of perception, the subject which appears in the judgment is evidently not reality at all, if by reality we mean something which is in no sense constituted by the thought-process. When I say, "The tree is green," the subject, tree, cannot be regarded as a bit of reality which is given ready-made to the thought-process. The ability to perceive a tree, to distinguish it from other objects and single it out for the application of an idea, evidently implies a long series of previous judgments. The content "tree" is itself ideal. As Bosanquet forcibly states it: "If a sensation or elementary perception is in consciousness (and if not we have nothing to do with it in logic), it already bears the form of thinking" (p. 33). How, then, can it serve as the subject of a judgment? Bosanquet's solution of the problem is to say that the real subject of a judgment is not the grammatical subject which appears in a proposition, but reality itself. In the more complex forms of judgment the reference to reality is disguised by the introduction of explicit ideas to designate the portion of reality to which reference is made (pp. 78, 79). In the simplest type of judgment known, however, the qualitative judgment of perception, the reference to reality appears within the judgment itself. The relations of thought to reality and of the elements of the judgment to one another can, accordingly, most readily be seen in the consideration of this rudimentary form of judgment in which the various parts lie bare before us.

Bosanquet describes it as follows:

Again, he says that the general features of the judgment of perception are as follows:

Our point of contact with reality, the place where reality gets into the thought-process, is, according to this view, to be found in the simplest, most indefinite type of judgment of perception. We meet with reality in the mere undefined "this" of primitive experience. But each such elementary judgment about an undefined "this" is an isolated bit of experience. Each "this" could give us only a detached bit of reality at best, and the further problem now confronts us of how we ever succeed in piecing our detached bits of reality together to form a real world. Bosanquet's explanation is, in his words, this:

Again he says:

The problem is the same as that with which Bradley struggles in his treatment of the subject of the judgment, and the solution is also the same. Bradley's treatment of the point is perhaps somewhat more explicit. Like Bosanquet, he starts with the proposition that the subject of the judgment must be reality itself and not an idea, because, if it were the latter, judgment could never give us anything but a union of ideas, and a union of ideas remains forever universal and hypothetical. It can never acquire the uniqueness, the singularity, which is necessary to make it refer to the real. Uniqueness can be found only in our contact with the real. But just where does our contact with the real occur? Bradley recognizes the fact that it cannot be the content—even in the case of a simple sensation—which gives us reality. The content of a sensation is a thing which is in my consciousness, and which has the form which it presents because it is in my consciousness. Reality is precisely something which is not itself sensation, and cannot be in my consciousness. If I say, "This is white," the "this" has a content which is a sensation of whiteness. But the sensation of whiteness is not reality. The experience brings with it an assurance of reality, not because its content is the real, but because it is "my direct encounter in sensible presentation with the real world."[46] To make the matter clearer, Bradley draws a distinction between the this and the thisness. In every experience, however simple, there is a content—a "thisness"—which is not itself unique. Considered merely as content, it is applicable to an indefinite number of existences; in other words, it is an idea. But there is also in every experience a "this" which is unique, but which is not a content. It is a mere sign of existence which gives the experience uniqueness, but nothing else. The "thisness" falls on the side of the content, and the "this" on the side of existence. It is exactly the distinction which Bosanquet has in mind in the passages quoted in which he tells us that "reality is given for me in present sensuous perception, and in the immediate feeling of my own sentient existence which goes with it;" and again when he says: "There is a presence of a something in contact with our sensitive self, which, as being so in contact, has the character of reality." The same point is made somewhat more explicitly in his introduction when he says that the individual's present perception is not, indeed, reality as such, but is his present point of contact with reality as such (p. 3).

But has this distinction between the content of an experience and its existence solved the problem of how we know reality? When Bosanquet talks of knowing reality, he means possessing ideas which are an accurate reproduction of reality. It is still far from clear how, according to his own account, we could ever have any assurance that our ideas do represent reality accurately, if we can nowhere find a point at which the content of an experience can be held to give us reality. The case is still worse when we go beyond the problem of how any particular bit of reality can be known, and ask ourselves how reality as a whole can be known. The explanation offered by both Bradley and Bosanquet is that by means of judgment we extend the bit of reality of whose existence we get a glimpse through a peep-hole in the curtain of sensuous perception, and thus build up the organized system of reality. In a passage previously quoted, Bosanquet tells us that all reality is continuous, and therefore the real subject of a judgment cannot be the mere spot or point which is given in sensuous perception, but must be the real world as a whole. But how does he know that reality is continuous, and that the real world is an organized system? Our only knowledge of reality comes through judgment, and judgment brings us into contact with reality only at isolated points. When he tells us that reality is a continuous whole, he does so on the basis of a metaphysical presupposition which is not justifiable by his theory of the judgment. The only statement about reality which could be maintained on the basis of his theory is that some sort of a reality exists, but the theory furnishes equal justification for the assurance that this reality is of such a nature that we can never know anything more about it than the bare fact of its existence. Moreover, the bare fact of the existence of reality comes to us merely in the form of a feeling of our own sentient existence which goes with sense-perception. But the mere assurance that somewhere behind the curtain of sensuous perception reality exists (even if this could go unchallenged), accompanied by the certainty that we can never by any possibility know anything more about it, is practically equivalent to the denial of the possibility of knowledge.[47]

Although the denial of the possibility of knowledge seems to be the logical outcome of the premises, it is not the conclusion reached by Bosanquet. At the outset of his treatise, Bosanquet propounds the fundamental question we have been considering in these words: "How does the analysis of knowledge as a systematic function, or system of functions, explain that relationship in which truth appears to consist, between the human intelligence on the one hand, and fact or reality on the other?" His answer is: "To this difficulty there is only one reply. If the object-matter of reality lay genuinely outside the system of thought, not only our analysis, but thought itself, would be unable to lay hold of reality." (Pp. 2, 3.) The statement is an explicit recognition of the impossibility of bridging the chasm between a reality outside the content of knowledge and a known real world. It brings before us the dilemma contained in Bosanquet's treatment of the subject of the judgment. On the one hand the subject of the judgment must be outside the realm of my thoughts. If it were not, judgment would merely establish a relation between my ideas and would give me no knowledge of the real world. On the other hand, the subject of the judgment must be within the realm of my thoughts. If it were not, I could never assert anything of it; could never judge, or know it. The stress he lays on the first horn of the dilemma has been shown. It remains to show his recognition of the second horn, and to find out whether or not he discovers any real reconciliation between the two.

Bosanquet sums up the section of the introduction on knowledge and its content, truth, with the following paragraph:

Here the subject of the judgment appears as an element of a reality which the individual has constructed by identifying significant ideas with that world of which he has assurance through his own perceptive experience. But the very point with reference to the subject of the judgment previously emphasized is that it is not and cannot be something which the individual has constructed. The subject of the judgment must be reality, and reality does not consist of ideas, even if it be determined by them. It does not mend matters to explain that the individual has constructed his real world by identifying significant ideas with that world of which he has assurance through his own perceptive experiences, because, as we have seen, "the individual's perceptive experiences" either turn out to be merely similar mental constructions made at a prior time, so that nothing is gained by attaching to them, or else they mean once more the mere shock of contact which is supposed to give assurance that some sort of reality exists, but which gives no assurance of what it is. That and what, this and thisness still remain detached. When he talks of the real world for any individual we are left entirely in the dark as to what the relation between the real world as it is for any individual and the real world as it is for itself may be, or how the individual is to gain any assurance that the real world as it is for him represents the real world as it is for itself.

Another attempt at a reconciliation of these opposing views leaves us no better satisfied. The passage is as follows:

In this passage by the "given" he evidently means the content of sensory experience, the thisness, the what. It is, as he says, of the same stuff as that by which it is extended. Both the given and that by which it is extended are artificial in the sense of not being real according to Bosanquet's interpretation of reality; they are ideas. But if all this is admitted, what becomes of the possibility of knowledge? Bosanquet undertakes to rescue it by assuring us again that it is the character and quality of being directly in contact with sense-perception, not any fixed datum of content, that forms the center of the individual's real world and gives the stamp of reality to his otherwise ideal extension of this center. Here again we find ourselves with no evidence that the content of our knowledge bears any relation to reality. We have merely the feeling of vividness attached to sensory experience which seems to bring us the certainty that there is some sort of a reality behind it, but this is not to give assurance that our ideal content even belongs rightfully to that against which we have bumped, much less of how it belongs—and only this deserves the title "knowledge."

In the chapter on "Quality and Comparison," in which he takes up the more detailed treatment of the simplest types of judgment of perception, he comes back to the same contradiction, and again attempts to explain how both horns of his dilemma must be true. The passage is this:

The conclusion he reaches is a mere restatement of the difficulty. The problem he is trying to solve is how the subject can be both in and out of the judgment, and how the subject without is related to the subject within. The mere assertion that it is so does not help us to understand it. His procedure seems like taking advantage of two meanings of sense-perception, its conscious quality and its brute abrupt immediacy, and then utilizing this ambiguity to solve a problem which grows out of the conception of judgment as a reference of idea to reality.

Turning from his treatment of the world of fact to his discussion of the world of idea, from the subject to the predicate, as it appears in his theory of the judgment we find again a paradox which must be recognized and cannot be obviated. An idea is essentially a meaning. It is not a particular existence whose essence is uniqueness as is the case with the subject of the judgment, but is a meaning whose importance is that it may apply to an indefinite number of unique existences. Its characteristic is universality. And yet an idea regarded as a psychical existence, an idea as a content in my mind, is just as particular and unique as any other existence. How, then, does it obtain its characteristic of universality? Bosanquet's answer is that it must be universal by means of a reference to something other than itself. Its meaning resides, not in its existence as a psychical image, but in its reference to something beyond itself. Now, any idea that is affirmed is referred to reality, but do ideas exist which are not being affirmed? If so, their reference cannot be to reality. Bosanquet discusses the question in the second section of his introduction as follows: