Analysis

“ While we analyse, we have to remember that the most correct analysis of features or characteristics may easily fail to give us a true idea of the face or the character which we analyse. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. ”

“ We ask ourselves the general question: 'WHAT DO WE EXPERIENCE WHEN WE THINK?' Then we do not at all attempt a preliminary determination of the concept 'thought,' but choose for analysis only such processes as everyone would describe as processes of thought. ”

“ It is a more subtle analysis than the familiar one, which divides the propositions that compose what we believe, into those that are the result of reasoning, and those that are known by us intuitively, and it suggests some curious questions regarding the nature and economy of certain of our intellectual functions. ”

“ Even logical development of a subject is subsidiary to the practical psychological order. Formal logic, the analysis of the process of reasoning, is a cultural study rather than a practical one, save in criticism both of one's own work and another's. ”

“ But when we are striving to go deeper, and are employing that gift of analysis which is man's prerogative, in order to proceed to a higher and more complete synthesis,—then we must be careful to keep separate those processes which analysis discloses to be distinct. ”

“ Since nothing can be concluded from a comparison of ‘This is good’ with, let us say, ‘This is sought by an impulse belonging to a dominant group’, let us see whether light can be gained by considering analogous instances in which special distinct ideas have for a time been thought indispensable only to yield later to analysis and substitution. ”

“ So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. ”

“ Such conclusions must, in last analysis, rest upon a satisfactory classification of mankind as a whole, but as stated at the outset, this has proved a difficult problem, and the reader will find the literature of the subject very perplexing, each investigator proposing a different scheme. ”

“ Now since this, it appears, cannot be done, by rejecting the Ideas which all Facts involve, in what manner are we to conform to the obvious maxim, that the Facts which form the basis of Science must be perfectly definite and certain?
The analysis of facts into Ideas and Sensations, which we have so often referred to, suggests the answer to this inquiry. We are not able, nor need we endeavour, to exclude Ideas from our Facts; but we may be able to discern, with perfect distinctness, the Ideas which we include. ”

“ By continuing analysis further we incorporate some distinctly impersonal universal basic qualities of humanity with the personal consciousness, which brings about the aforesaid enlargement, and this to some extent may be described as an unpleasant consequence of analysis. ”

“ The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. ”

“ Now, if we will annex a meaning to our words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort. ”

“ Thus we may say that a word embodies a vague idea when its effects are appropriate to an individual, but are the same for various similar individuals, while a word embodies a general idea when its effects are different from those appropriate to individuals. ”

“ What is the precise effect of our argument on the subject of the human mind? Its precise effect and bearing is to turn us to the study of fact—of a clear and a peculiar fact—from the contemplation of an object which is either an hypothesis, or else no object at all (not even an hypothesis but a contradiction) , or else an irrelevant object of research, and one which cannot by any conceivability contain the fact which it is our business to investigate. ”

“ For these systems or masses of experience are the substance of Logic and Methodology, which are their skeletons abstracted from them. They are the basis of all effective comparison and criticism; agreement or disagreement with them is the test of truth or error. ”

“ Now in this extremely elementary consideration, namely, in the consideration that unless ideas first voluntarily bind themselves to a given task, and so, by their internal purpose, already commit themselves to a certain selection of its object, they are neither true nor false, — in this consideration, I say, there may be hidden consequences that we shall later find momentous for the whole theory of Being and of truth. ”

“ One is a statement about phenomena, about the objects which are actually in my possession; the other is a statement about my feelings, about my wants and desires. There are facts, to be got at by common sense, about the kind of thing that a man of a certain character and occupation will like to have in his house, and these facts may be organized into general statements on the assumption of uniformity in nature. Now the organized results of common sense dealing with facts are just science and nothing else. ”

“ But how do we human beings get at what we call natural truth? By observation—so men say—and by experience. But by whose experience? By the united, by the synthesized, by the revised, corrected, rationally criticized, above all by the common, experience of many individuals. ”

“ And since it is by these laws, combined with the facts of each particular case, that the whole of the phenomena of human action and feeling are produced, it is on these that every rational attempt to construct the science of human nature in the concrete, and for practical purposes, must proceed. ”

“ But your hypotheses about particular problems must be judged by themselves. Your body of central truth is subject only to the test just mentioned. And you call this truth “absolute” merely because you conceive that it bears this test. Whether it does so is a question of fact, not of authority. And every man must, in such a matter, look for himself before judging about what is offered to him.
As to the principal special features of this discussion, they are: (1) The definition and comparison of what I have called the Four Historical Concepts of Being. ”

“ Thus the objective explanation of a subjective fact, once entertained, tends by force of logic to become general, to include a whole class of similar phenomena, to become a system, and, if need be, a cosmological and metaphysical system. ”

“ Our intentions are nothing less than the theoretical expression and the practical explanation of the data offered us by the interpretation of the process which is being accomplished among us and about us and which has its whole existence in the objective relations of social life of which we are the subject and the object, the cause and the effect. ”

“ We have exhorted you to use your eyes, and your judgments, never your imagination; to abstain from theory, and rest with facts; and to understand that in the accumulation of facts, as regards the nature and properties of substances, the order of occurrences, and the consequences of actions, lies the whole science of philosophy, physical and moral. We have seen, in the course of our enquiry, that in matter itself, exist all causes and effects ”

“ By thus first distinguishing sharply between the conscious internal meaning of an idea and its apparently external meaning, we get before us an important way of stating the problem of knowledge or, in other words, the problem of the whole relation between Idea and Being. ”

“ The subject to be studied is, the origin and sources of all those qualities in human beings which are interesting to us, either as facts to be produced, to be avoided, or merely to be understood; and the object is, to determine, from the general laws of mind, combined with the general position of our species in the universe, what actual or possible combinations of circumstances are capable of promoting or of preventing the production of those qualities. ”

“ This realism is complemented by a corresponding theory of knowledge, according to which reason is the gradual product of an experience more or less long, and gives a faithful representation of the order in the external world. These premises condition the adoption of the 'natural' method, which consists in always reasoning from the physical to the moral, from the inferior to the superior. ”

“ The principles that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule our actions,—have they in themselves an absolute truth, or are they only regulating laws of our thought? The question is, to know whether it is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality a subject, whether every thing extended is really in space, and every succession in time, etc. ”

“ Now, therefore, let us, who understand each other, learn some logic together, and write so that the world shall understand something of which you have caught a glimpse, and which you know to be part of the scientific framework round which must be organised anything which could claim the right to describe itself as an organic art of thinking. ”

“ In the present question, the links of experience sequent upon an idea, which mediate between it and a reality, form and for the pragmatist indeed ARE, the CONCRETE relation of truth that may obtain between the idea and that reality. They, he says, are all that we mean when we speak of the idea 'pointing' to the reality, 'fitting' it, 'corresponding' with it, or 'agreeing' with it,—they or other similar mediating trains of verification. ”

“ When they themselves say that they perceive the things by an immediate act of a faculty given for that purpose by their Creator, it would be said of them by their opponents that they find an idea or conception in their own minds, and from the idea or conception, infer the existence of a corresponding objective reality. ”

“ How comes it, then, to interpret its world of facts as such that another Self could find these same facts, or some aspect of them, to be also its own facts? The power to make this abstraction, however much social intercourse is needed to give it definition, must have its logical roots in the consciousness of the Individual. ”

“ In other words, we shall find that while, for our purposes, we, the critics, must first sharply distinguish the apparently external purpose that, as it were, from without, we assign to the idea, from the internal meaning of the idea, as present to a passing conscious instant, still, this our assignment of the external purpose, this our assertion that the idea knows or resembles, or imitates, or corresponds to, fact wholly beyond itself, must in the end be justified, if at all, by appeal to the truth, i.e. ”

“ And now, finally, after surveying all these so various types of beings, we have to recall the comment often already made in these lectures, and to assert that not only these different kinds of realities, but also the concrete experiences whereby we come to observe, and the ideas whereby we ourselves define, describe, and in general undertake to know these very objects, are themselves also in their own measure real, and are as truly real as are the various finite objects of common sense that we know. ”

“ Our preference, however, for the objects of sense, for the pen, and the sun, as typical instances of objects of ideas, arises from the fact that in case of just these objects, it is especially easy, by observing, from without, the acts of the person who has these ideas, to form confident and, for common-sense purposes, relatively exact notions of the selection to which the internal meaning of the ideas has bound the maker of any given judgment about objects. ”

“ Of the science, therefore, which expounds the operations of the human understanding in the pursuit of truth, one essential part is the inquiry: What are the facts which are the objects of intuition or consciousness, and what are those which we merely infer? But this inquiry has never been considered a portion of logic. ”

“ Instead of recognizing, as in the Cours de Philosophic Positive, an essentially sound view of philosophy, with a few capital errors, it is in their general character that we deem the subsequent speculations false and misleading, while in the midst of this wrong general tendency, we find a crowd of valuable thoughts, and suggestions of thought, in detail. ”

“ But if the universal character of the hypothesis and the tested theory belong to the instrumental character of thought in so reconstructing a world that has proved to be imperfect, and inadequate to conduct, the stuff of the world and of the new hypothesis are the same. ”

“ We analyse experience with a view to discovering its implications, and we analyse our various scientific and unscientific theories of the contents of the world-system for the same purpose. Also, once having determined what are the formal characteristics of an all-embracing, systematic whole of experienced fact, we criticise our various concepts and theories by reference to these characteristics as an ultimate standard of reality and truth. ”

“ The abstractness of our momentary knowledge, the vastness of our momentary ignorance of all concrete facts, no theory of knowledge recognizes more sincerely than does our own. But that all differences rest upon an underlying unity, — this is the very thesis which, in our present series of discussions, we are trying to make more concrete. ”

“ To understand, we have analyzed the intellectual world into two classes, good and evil; and to discover the members of each class, we fix their qualities, not by the hypothetick, but the practical mode of reasoning. ”

“ They begin with the universal proposition, that every effect must have a cause, as a self-evident truth, and then proceed, not to examine and discover how the world is made, but to demonstrate how it must have been constructed. ”

“ Our very theory insists that your internal meanings, your ideas viewed as internally significant, your selections and expressions, are typical instances of facts, and of precisely the facts of whose unity the world consists. ”