the unreasoning revolt of heart against head found at all epochs, but something articulate and constructive? The field is only too large, and I shall limit myself to the evolution of the knowledge standpoint itself. I shall suggest, first, that the progress of intelligence directed upon natural materials has evolved a procedure of knowledge that renders untenable the inherited conception of knowledge; and, secondly, that this result is reinforced by the specific results of some of the special sciences.
1. First, then, the very use of the knowledge standpoint, the very expression of the knowledge preoccupation, has produced methods and tests that, when formulated, intimate a radically different conception of knowledge, and of its relation to existence and belief, than the orthodox one.
The one thing that stands out is that thinking is inquiry, and that knowledge as science is the outcome of systematically directed inquiry.
For a time it was natural enough that inquiry should be interpreted in the old sense, as just change of subjective attitudes and opinions to make them square up with a “reality” that is already there in ready-made, fixed, and finished form. The rationalist had one notion of the reality, _i.e._, that it was of the nature of laws, genera, or an ordered system, and so thought of concepts, axioms, etc., as the indicated modes of representation. The empiricist, holding reality to be a lot of little discrete particular lumps, thought of disjointed sensations as its appropriate counterpart. But both alike were thorough conformists. If “reality” is already and completely given, and if knowledge is just submissive acceptance, then, of course, inquiry is only a subjective change in the human “mind” or in “consciousness,”--these being subjective and “unreal.”
But the very development of the sciences served to reveal a peculiar and intolerable paradox. Epistemology, having condemned inquiry once for all to the region of subjectivity in an invidious sense, finds itself in flat opposition in principle and in detail to the assumption and to the results of the sciences. Epistemology is bound to deny to the results of the special sciences in detail any ulterior objectivity just because they always _are_ in a process of inquiry--_in_ solution.
While a man may not be halted at being told that his mental activities, since his, are not genuinely real, many men will draw violently back at being told that all the discoveries, conclusions, explanations, and theories of the sciences share the same fate, being the products of a discredited mind. And, in general, epistemology, in relegating human thinking as inquiry to a merely phenomenal region, makes concrete approximation and conformity to objectivity hopeless. Even if it did square itself up to and by “reality” it never could be sure of it.
The ancient myth of Tantalus and his effort to drink the water before him seems to be ingeniously prophetic of modern epistemology. The thirstier, the needier of truth the human mind, and the intenser the efforts put forth to slake itself in the ocean of being just beyond the edge of consciousness, the more surely the living waters of truth recede!
When such self-confessed sterility is joined with consistent derogation of all the special results of the special sciences, some one is sure to raise the cry of “dog in the manger,” or of “sour grapes.” A revision of the theory of thinking, of inquiry, would seem to be inevitable; a revision which should cease trying to construe knowledge as an attempted approximation to a reproduction of reality under conditions that condemn it in advance to failure; a revision which should start frankly from the fact of thinking as inquiring, and purely external realities as terms in inquiries, and which should construe validity, objectivity, truth, and the test and system of truths, on the basis of what they actually mean and do within inquiry.
Such a standpoint promises ample revenge for the long damnation and longer neglect to which the principle of belief has been subjected.
The whole procedure of thinking as developed in those extensive and intensive inquiries that constitute the sciences, is but rendering into a systematic technique, into an art deliberately and delightfully pursued, the rougher and cruder means by which practical human beings have in all ages worked out the implications of their beliefs, tested them, and endeavored in the interests of economy, efficiency, and freedom, to render them coherent with one another. Belief, sheer, direct, unmitigated belief, reappears as the working hypothesis; action that at once develops and tests belief reappears in experimentation, deduction, demonstration; while the machinery of universals, axioms, _a priori_ truths, etc., becomes a systematization of the way in which men have always worked out, in anticipation of overt action, the implications of their beliefs, with a view to revising them, in the interests of obviating unfavorable, and securing welcome consequences.
Observation, with its machinery of sensations, measurements, etc., is the resurrection of the way in which agents have always faced and tried to define the problems that face them; truth is the union of abstract postulated meanings and of concrete brute facts in a way that circumvents the latter by judging them from a new standpoint, while it tests concepts by using them as methods in the same active experience.
It all comes to experience personally conducted and personally consummated.
Let consciousness of these facts dawn a little more brightly over the horizon of epistemological prejudices, and it will be seen that nothing prevents admitting the genuineness both of thinking activities and of their characteristic results, except the notion that belief itself is not a genuine ingredient of existence--a notion which itself is not only a belief, but a belief which, unlike the convictions of the common man and the hypotheses of science, finds its proud proof in the fact that it does not demean itself so unworthily as to work.
Once believe that beliefs themselves are as “real” as anything else can ever be, and we have a world in which uncertainty, doubtfulness, really inhere; and in which personal attitudes and responses are real both in their own distinctive existence, and as the only ways in which an as yet undetermined factor of reality takes on shape, meaning, value, truth. If “to wilful men the injuries that they themselves procure, must be their schoolmasters”--and all beliefs are wilful--then by the same token the propitious evolutions of meaning, which wilful men secure to an expectant universe, must be their compensation and their justification. In a doubtful and needy universe elements must be beggarly, and the development of personal beliefs into experimentally executed systems of actions, is the organized bureau of philanthropy which confers upon a travailing universe the meaning for which it cries out. The apostrophe of the poet is above all to man the thinker, the inquirer, the knower: O Dreamer! O Desirer, goer down Unto untraveled seas in untried ships, O crusher of the unimagined grape, On unconceivèd lips.
2. Biology, psychology, and the social sciences proffer an imposing body of concrete facts that also point to the rehabilitation of belief--to the interpretation of knowledge as a human and practical outgrowth of belief, not to belief as the state to which knowledge is condemned in a merely finite and phenomenal world. I need not, as I cannot, here summarize the psychological revision which the notions of sensation, perception, conception, cognition in general have undergone, all to one intent. “Motor” is writ large on their face. The testimony of biology is unambiguous to the effect that the organic instruments of the whole intellectual life, the sense-organs and brain and their connections, have been developed on a definitely practical basis and for practical aims, for the purpose of such control over conditions as will sustain and vary the meanings of life. The historic sciences are equally explicit in their evidence that knowledge as a system of information and instruction is a coöperative social achievement, at all times socially toned, sustained, and directed; and that logical thinking is a reweaving through individual activity of this social fabric at such points as are indicated by prevailing needs and aims.
This bulky and coherent body of testimony is not, of course, of itself philosophy. But it supplies, at all events, facts that have scientific backing, and that are as worthy of regard as the facts pertinent to any science. At the present time these facts seem to have some peculiar claim just because they present traits largely ignored in prior philosophic formulations, while those belonging to mathematics and physics have so largely wrought their sweet will on systems. Again, it would seem as if in philosophies built deliberately upon the knowledge principle, any body of known facts should not have to clamor for sympathetic attention.
Such being the case, the reasons for ruling psychology and sociology and allied sciences out of competency to give philosophic testimony have more significance than the bare denial of jurisdiction. They are evidences of the deep-rooted preconception that whatever concerns a particular conscious agent, a wanting, struggling, satisfied and dissatisfied being, must of course be only “phenomenal” in import.
This aversion is the more suggestive when the professed idealist appears as the special champion of the virginity of pure knowledge.
The idealist, so content with the notion that consciousness determines reality, provided it be done once for all, at a jump and in lump, is so uneasy in presence of the idea that empirical conscious beings genuinely determine existences now and here! One is reminded of the story told, I think, by Spencer. Some committee had organized and contended, through a long series of parliaments, for the passage of a measure. At last one of their meetings was interrupted with news of success. Consternation was the result. What was to become of the occupation of the committee? So, one asks, what is to become of idealism at large, of the wholesale unspecifiable determination of “reality” by or in “consciousness,” if specific conscious beings, John Smiths, and Susan Smiths (to say nothing of their animal relations), beings with bowels and brains, are found to exercise influence upon the character and existence of reals?
One would be almost justified in construing idealism as a Pickwickian scheme, so willing is it to idealize the principle of intelligence at the expense of its specific undertakings, were it not that this reluctance is the necessary outcome of the Stoic basis and tenor of idealism--its preoccupation with logical contents and relations in abstraction from their _situs_ and function in conscious living beings.
IV I have suggested to you the naïve conception of the relation of beliefs to realities: that beliefs are themselves real without discount, manifesting their reality in the usual proper way, namely, by modifying and shaping the reality of other things, so that they connect the bias, the preferences and affections, the needs and endeavors of personal lives with the values, the characters ascribed to things:--the latter thus becoming worthy of human acquaintance and responsive to human intercourse. This was followed by a sketch of the history of thought, indicating how beliefs and all they insinuate were subjected to preconceived notions of knowledge and of “reality” as a monopolistic possession of pure intellect. Then I traced some of the _motifs_ that make for reconsideration of the supposed uniquely exclusive relation of logical knowledge and “reality”; _motifs_ that make for a less invidiously superior attitude towards the convictions of the common man.
In concluding, I want to say a word or two to mitigate--for escape is impossible--some misunderstandings. And, to begin with, while possible doubts inevitably troop with actual beliefs, the doctrine in question is not particularly sceptical. The radical empiricist, the humanist, the pragmatist, label him as you will, believes not in fewer but in more “realities” than the orthodox philosophers warrant. He is not concerned, for example, in discrediting objective realities and logical or universal thinking; he is interested in such a reinterpretation of the sort of “reality” which these things possess as will accredit, without depreciation, concrete empirical conscious centers of action and passion.
My second remark is to the opposite effect. The intent is not especially credulous, although it starts from and ends with the radical credulity of all knowledge. To suppose that because the sciences are ultimately instrumental to human beliefs, we are therefore to be careless of the most exact possible use of extensive and systematic scientific methods, is like supposing that because a watch is made to tell present time, and not to be an exemplar of transcendent, absolute time, watches might as well be made of cheap stuffs, casually wrought and clumsily put together. It is the task of telling present time, with all its urgent implications, that brings home, steadies, and enlarges the responsibility for the best possible use of intelligence, the instrument.
For one, I have no interest in the old, old scheme of derogating from the worth of knowledge in order to give an uncontrolled field for some _special_ beliefs to run riot in,--be these beliefs even faith in immortality, in some special sort of a Deity, or in some particular brand of freedom. Any one of our beliefs is subject to criticism, revision, and even ultimate elimination through the development of its own implications by intelligently directed action. Because reason is a scheme of working out the meanings of convictions in terms of one another and of the consequences they import in further experience, convictions are the more, not the less, amenable and responsible to the full exercise of reason.[29] Thus we are put on the road to that most desirable thing,--the union of acknowledgment of moral powers and demands with thoroughgoing naturalism. No one really wants to lame man’s practical nature; it is the supposed exigencies of natural science that force the hand. No one really bears a grudge against naturalism for the sake of obscurantism.
It is the need of some sacred reservation for moral interests that coerces. We all want to be as naturalistic as we can be. But the “can be” is the rub. If we set out with a fixed dualism of belief and knowledge, then the uneasy fear that the natural sciences are going to encroach and destroy “spiritual values” haunts us. So we build them a citadel and fortify it; that is, we isolate, professionalize, and thereby weaken beliefs. But if beliefs are the most natural, and in that sense, the most metaphysical of all things, and if knowledge is an organized technique for working out their implications and interrelations, for directing their formation and employ, how unnecessary, how petty the fear and the caution. Because freedom of belief is ours, free thought may exercise itself; the freer the thought the more sure the emancipation of belief. Hug some special belief and one fears knowledge; believe in belief and one loves and cleaves to knowledge.
We have here, too, the possibility of a common understanding, in thought, in language, in outlook, of the philosopher and the common man. What would not the philosopher give, did he not have to part with some of his common humanity in order to join a class? Does he not always, when challenged, justify himself with the contention that all men naturally philosophize, and that he but does in a conscious and orderly way what leads to harm when done in an indiscriminate and irregular way? If philosophy be at once a natural history _and_ a logic--an art--of beliefs, then its technical justification is at one with its human justification. The natural attitude of man, said Emerson, is believing; “the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing.” Let the struggle then enlighten and enlarge beliefs; let the reasons kindle and engender new beliefs.
Finally, it is not a solution, but a problem which is presented. As philosophers, our disagreements as to conclusions are trivial compared with our disagreement as to problems. To see the problem another sees, in the same perspective and at the same angle--that amounts to something. Agreement in solutions is in comparison perfunctory. To experience the same problem another feels--that perhaps is agreement.
In a world where distinctions are as invidious as comparisons are odious, and where intellect works only by comparison and distinction, pray what is one to do?
But beliefs are personal matters, and the person, we may still believe, is social. To be a man is to be thinking desire; and the agreement of desires is not in oneness of intellectual conclusion, but in the sympathies of passion and the concords of action:--and yet significant union in affection and behavior may depend upon a consensus in thought that is secured only by discrimination and comparison.
EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE IDEALISM[30] I Idealism as a philosophic system stands in such a delicate relation to experience as to invite attention. In its subjective form, or sensationalism, it claims to be the last word of empiricism. In its objective, or rational form, it claims to make good the deficiencies of the subjective type, by emphasizing the work of thought that supplies the factors of objectivity and universality lacking in sensationalism.
With reference to experience _as it now is_, such idealism is half opposed to empiricism and half committed to it,--antagonistic, so far as existing experience is regarded as tainted with a sensational character; favorable, so far as this experience is even now prophetic of some final, all-comprehensive, or absolute experience, which in truth is one with reality.
That this combination of opposition to present experience with devotion to the cause of experience in the abstract leaves objective idealism in a position of unstable equilibrium from which it can find release only by euthanasia in a thorough-going empiricism seems evident.
Some of the reasons for this belief may be readily approached by a summary sketch of three historic episodes in which have emerged important conceptions of experience and its relation to reason. The first takes us to classic Greek thought. Here experience means the preservation, through memory, of the net result of a multiplicity of particular doings and sufferings; a preservation that affords positive skill in maintaining further practice, and promise of success in new emergencies. The craft of the carpenter, the art of the physician are standing examples of its nature. It differs from instinct and blind routine or servile practice because there is some knowledge of materials, methods, and aims, in their adjustment to one another.
Yet the marks of its passive, habitual origin are indelibly stamped upon it. On the knowledge side it can never aspire beyond opinion, and if true opinion be achieved, it is only by happy chance. On the active side it is limited to the accomplishment of a special work or a particular product, following some unjustified, because assumed, method. Thus it contrasts with the true knowledge of reason, which is direct apprehension, self-revealing and self-validating, of an eternal and harmonious content. The regions in which experience and reason respectively hold sway are thus explained. Experience has to do with production, which, in turn, is relative to decay. It deals with generation, becoming, not with finality, being. Hence it is infected with the trait of relative non-being, of mere imitativeness; hence its multiplicity, its logical inadequacy, its relativity to a standard and end beyond itself. Reason, _per contra_, has to do with meaning, with significance (ideas, forms), that is eternal and ultimate. Since the meaning of anything is the worth, the good, the end of that thing, experience presents us with partial and tentative efforts to achieve the embodiment of purpose, under conditions that doom the attempt to inconclusiveness. It has, however, its meed of reality in the degree in which its results _participate_ in meaning, the good, reason.
From this classic period, then, comes the antithesis of experience as the historically achieved _embodiments_ of meaning, partial, multiple, insecure, to reason as the source, author, and container of _meaning_, permanent, assured, unified. Idealism means ideality, experience means brute and broken facts. That things exist because of and for the sake of meaning, and that experience gives us meaning in a servile, interrupted, and inherently deficient way--such is the standpoint.
Experience gives us meaning in process of becoming; special and isolated instances in which it _happens_, temporally, to appear, rather than meaning pure, undefiled, independent. Experience presents purpose, the good, struggling against obstacles, “involved in matter.”
Just how much the vogue of modern neo-Kantian idealism, professedly built upon a strictly epistemological instead of upon a cosmological basis, is due, in days of a declining theology, to a vague sense that affirming the function of reason in the constitution of a knowable world (which in its own constitution as logically knowable may be, morally and spiritually, anything you please), carries with it an assurance of the superior reality of the good and the beautiful as well as of the “true,” it would be hard to say. Certainly unction seems to have descended upon epistemology, in apostolic succession, from classic idealism; so that neo-Kantianism is rarely without a tone of edification, as if feeling itself the patron of man’s spiritual interests in contrast to the supposed crudeness and insensitiveness of naturalism and empiricism. At all events, we find here one element in our problem: Experience considered as the summary of past episodic adventures and happenings in relation to fulfilled and adequately expressed meaning.
The second historic event centers about the controversy of innate ideas, or pure concepts. The issue is between empiricism and rationalism as theories of the origin and validation of scientific knowledge. The empiricist is he who feels that the chief obstacle which prevents scientific method from making way is the belief in pure thoughts, not derived from particular observations and hence not responsible to the course of experience. His objection to the “high _a priori_ road” is that it introduces in irresponsible fashion a mode of presumed knowledge which may be used at any turn to stand sponsor for mere tradition and prejudice, and thus to nullify the results of science resting upon and verified by observable facts. Experience thus comes to mean, to use the words of Peirce, “that which is forced upon a man’s recognition will-he, nill-he, and shapes his thoughts to something quite different from what they naturally would have taken.”[31] The same definition is found in James, in his chapter on Necessary Truths: “Experience means experience of something foreign supposed to impress us whether spontaneously or in consequence of our own exertions and acts.”[32] As Peirce points out, this notion of experience as the foreign element that forces the hand of thought and controls its efficacy, goes back to Locke. Experience is “observation employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds”[33]--as furnishing in short all the valid data and tests of thinking and knowledge. This meaning, thinks Peirce, should be accepted “as a landmark which it would be a crime to disturb or displace.”
The contention of idealism, here bound up with rationalism, is that perception and observation cannot guarantee knowledge in its honorific sense (science); that the peculiar differentia of scientific knowledge is a constancy, a universality, and necessity that contrast at every point with perceptual data, and that indispensably require the function of conception.[34] In short, _qualitative transformation_ of _facts_ (data of perception), not their mechanical subtraction and recombination, is the difference between scientific and perceptual knowledge. Here the problem which emerges is, of course, the significance of perception and of conception in respect to experience.[35] The third episode reverses in a curious manner (which confuses present discussion) the notion of experience as a foreign, alien, coercive material. It regards experience as a fortuitous association, by merely psychic connections, of individualistic states of consciousness.
This is due to the Humian development of Locke. The “objects” and “operations,” which to Locke were just given and secured in observation, become shifting complexes of subjective sensations and ideas, whose apparent permanency is due to discoverable illusions.
This, of course, is the empiricism which made Kant so uneasily toss in his dogmatic slumbers (a tossing that he took for an awakening); and which, by reaction, called out the conception of thought as a function operating both to elevate perceptual data to scientific status, and also to confer objective status, or knowable character, upon even sensational data and their associative combinations.[36] Here emerges the third element in our problem: The function of thought as furnishing objectivity to any experience that claims cognitive reference or capacity.
Summing up the matter, idealism stands forth with its assertion of thought or reason as (1) the sponsor for all significance, ideality, purpose, in experience,--the author of the good and the beautiful as well as the true; (2) the power, located in pure conceptions, required to elevate perceptive or observational material to the plane of science; and (3) the constitution that gives objectivity, even the semblance of order, system, connection, mutual reference, to sensory data that without its assistance are mere subjective flux.
II I begin the discussion with the last-named function. Thought is here conceived as _a priori_, not in the sense of particular innate ideas, but of a function that constitutes the very possibility of any objective experience, any experience involving reference beyond its own mere subjective happening. I shall try to show that idealism is condemned to move back and forth between two inconsistent interpretations of this _a priori_ thought. It is taken to mean both the organized, the regulated, the informed, established character of experience, an order immanent and constitutional; and an agency which organizes, regulates, forms, synthesizes, a power operative and constructive. And the oscillation between and confusion of these two diverse senses is necessary to Neo-Kantian idealism.
When Kant compared his work in philosophy to that of the men who introduced construction into geometry, and experimentation into physics and chemistry, the point of his remarks depends upon taking the _a priori_ worth of thought in a regulative, directive, controlling sense, thought as consciously, intentionally, making an experience _different_ in a _determinate_ sense and manner. But the point of his answer to Hume consists in taking the _a priori_ in the other sense, as something which is _already_ immanent in _any_ experience, and which accordingly makes no determinate difference to any one experience as compared with any other, or with any past or future form of itself. The concept is treated first as that which makes an experience actually different, controlling its evolution towards consistency, coherency, and objective reliability; then, it is treated as that which has already effected the organization of any and every experience that comes to recognition at all. The fallacy from which he never emerges consists in vibrating between the definition of a concept as a rule of constructive synthesis in a _differential_ sense, and the definition of it as a static endowment lurking in “mind,” and giving automatically a hard and fixed law for the determination of every experienced object. The _a priori_ conceptions of Kant as immanent fall, like the rain, upon the just and the unjust; upon error, opinion, and hallucination. But Kant slides into these _a priori_ functions the preferential values exercised by empirical reflective thought. The concept of triangle, taken geometrically, means doubtless a determinate method of construing space elements; but to Kant it also means something that exists in the mind _prior_ to all such geometrical constructions and that unconsciously lays down the law not only for their conscious elaboration, but also for any space perception, even for that which takes a rectangle to be a triangle. The first of the meanings is intelligible, and marks a definite contribution to the logic of science. But it is not “objective idealism”; it is a contribution to a revised empiricism. The second is a dark saying.
That organization of some sort exists in every experience I make no doubt. That isolation, discrepancy, the fragmentary, the incompatible, are brought to recognition and to logical function only with reference to some prior existential mode of organization seems clear. And it seems equally clear that reflection goes on with profit only because the materials with which it deals have already some degree of organization, or exemplify various relationships. As against Hume, or even Locke, we may be duly grateful to Kant for enforcing acknowledgment of these facts. But the acknowledgment means simply an improved and revised empiricism.
For, be it noted, this organization, first, is not the work of reason or thought, unless “reason” be stretched beyond all identification; and, secondly, it has no sacrosanct or finally valid and worthful character. (1) Experience always carries with it and within it certain systematized arrangements, certain classifications (using the term without intellectualistic prejudice), coexistent and serial. If we attribute these to “thought” then the structure of the brain of a Mozart which hears and combines sounds in certain groupings, the psycho-physical visual habit of the Greek, the locomotor apparatus of the human body in the laying-out and plotting of space is “thought.”
Social institutions, established political customs, effect and perpetuate modes of reaction and of perception that compel a certain grouping of objects, elements, and values. A national constitution brings about a definite arrangement of the factors of human action which holds even physical things together in certain determinate orders. Every successful economic process, with its elaborate divisions and adjustments of labor, of materials and instruments, is just such an objective organization. Now it is one thing to say that thought has played a part in the origin and development of such organizations, and continues to have a rôle in their judicious employment and application; it is another to say that these organizations _are_ thought, or are its exclusive product. Thought that functions in these ways is distinctively _reflective_ thought, thought as practical, volitional, deliberately exercised for specific aims--thought as an act, an art of skilled mediation. As _reflective_ thought, its end is to terminate its own first and experimental forms, and to secure an organization which, while it may evoke new reflective thinking, puts an end to the thinking that secured the organization. _As organizations_, as established, effectively controlling arrangements of objects in experience, their mark is that they are not thoughts, but habits, customs of action.[37] Moreover, such reflective thought as does intervene in the formation and maintenance of these practical organizations harks back to prior practical organizations, biological and social in nature. It serves to _valuate_ organizations already existent as biological functions and instincts, while, as itself a biological activity, it redirects them to new conditions and results. Recognize, for example, that a geometric concept is a practical locomotor function of arranging stimuli in reference to maintenance of life activities _brought into consciousness_, and then serving as a center of reorganization of such activities to freer, more varied flexible and valuable forms; recognize this, and we have the truth of the Kantian idea, without its excrescences and miracles. The concept is the practical activity doing consciously and artfully what it had aforetime done blindly and aimlessly, and thereby not only doing it better but opening up a freer world of significant activities. Thought as such a reorganization of natural functions does naturally what Kantian forms and schematizations do only supernaturally. In a word, the constructive or organizing activity of “thought” does not inhere in thought as a transcendental function, a form or mode of some supra-empirical ego, mind, or consciousness, but in thought as itself vital activity. And in any case we have passed to the idea of thought as reflectively reconstructive and directive, and away from the notion of thought as immanently constitutional and organizational. To make this passage and yet to ignore its existence and import is essential to objective idealism.
(2) No final or ultimate validity attaches to these original arrangements and institutionalizations in any case. Their value is teleological and experimental, not fixedly ontological. “Law and order” are good things, but not when they become rigidity, and create mechanical uniformity or routine. Prejudice is the acme of the _a priori_. Of the _a priori_ in this sense we may say what is always to be said of habits and institutions: They are good servants, but harsh and futile masters. Organization as already effected is always in danger of becoming a _mortmain_; it may be a way of sacrificing novelty, flexibility, freedom, creation to static standards. The curious inefficiency of idealism at this point is evident in the fact that genuine thought, empirical reflective thought, is required precisely for the purpose of re-forming established and set formations.
In short, (_a_) _a priori_ character is no exclusive function of thought. Every biological function, every motor attitude, every vital impulse as the carrying vehicle of experience is thus _apriorily_ regulative in prospective reference; what we call apperception, expectation, anticipation, desire, demand, choice, are pregnant with this constitutive and organizing power. (_b_) In so far as “thought” does exercise such reorganizing power, it is because thought is itself still a _vital_ function. (_c_) Objective idealism depends not only upon ignoring the existence and capacity of vital functions, but upon a