side 205

(fortsat fra side 204)

identification of essence and attribute, which is only possible in an

active percipient.

The logical abstraction of 'pure being' as the activity of the sub-

ject apart from the content (meaning - i. e., attribute) is possible,

but it involves, as Hegel abundantly showed, the loss of reality. Pure

being and non-being were in this sense the same, both being all one

to the subject who demands the act of asserting or identifying as well

as the mode asserted.

Professor Baldwin has made, as we intimated above, the important

distinction between psychic and psychological, and both Professor

Bawden and the writer have shown that the psychic cannot become

the subject of scientific analysis. Nevertheless it does afford the

foundation on which science (the psychological) must rest. The

predicate of reality pertains and can pertain only to the psychic. We

do not construct reality but simply perceive (affirm) it. This ultimate

fact in experience is reality. The opposite to real is not false, it is

non-existent or unreal.

If it be objected that this limitation does violence to common usage

it must be replied that any necessary logical distinction may do the

same. The distinction between psychic and psychological traverses

ordinary usage from end to end but if it expresses a true distinction it

is well worth while to reconstruct terminology. In fact, it may well

be that any further great advance in psychology must wait for a

wholesale reformation of terminology.

The point is that we must have a word for this primary feeling-

cognition which we have called reality. Reality is not something we

say about experience but a quale of experience itself. We ascribe

truth to relations of things or events among themselves, or ultimately

as parts of a universe of things and events. Any reality would be no

less real if it existed alone. If we must use Lotze's definition of

reality as a 'standing in relation' we should say reality grows out of

a relation to the subject alone, but this is a metaphysical after-thought.

When the naked fact of experience comes to be thought about or,

in Baldwin's language, becomes psychological, we begin to develop

relations which are true or false in so far as they do or do not cohere

in an organized whole. The whole duty of science is so to cause the

facts thought of to cohere in an organization. This is the sphere of

truth.

There is a sense, however, in which reality escapes from the limi-

tation of the psychic and sits enthroned over all thinking. In last

analysis elements of our thinking have to be verified by reference to

(fortsættes på side 206)