378 METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCE 



such a chaos accordingly contradicts neither the nature of our mind 

 nor our experience. (3) Neither the former nor the latter gives us 

 sufficient reason to believe that such an irregular alternation does 

 not actually exist somewhere in the observable world. (4) If such 

 a chaos should be presented to us as fact, that is, if we were in a 

 position to outlive such an alternation, then the belief in the uniform- 

 ity of time relations would soon cease. 



Every one would subscribe to the last of these four theses, im- 

 mediately upon such a chaos being admitted to be a possibility of 

 thought; that is, he would unless he shared the rationalistic con- 

 viction that our thought constitutes an activity absolutely inde- 

 pendent of all experience. We must simply accept this conclusion 

 on the ground of the previous discussion and of a point still to be 

 brought forward. 



If we grant this conclusion, however, then it follows, on the 

 ground of our previous demonstration of the reproductive and 

 recognitive, as well as thought elements involved in the uniform 

 sequence, that the irregularity in the appearance of the events, 

 assumed in such a chaos, can bring about an absolutely relationless 

 alternation of impressions for the subject that we should presuppose 

 to be doing the perceiving. If we still \vish to call it perception, it 

 would remain only a perception in which no component of its con- 

 tent could be related to the others, a perception, therefore, in which 

 not even the synthesis of the several perception contents could be 

 apprehended as such. That is, every combination of the different 

 perception contents, by which they become components of one and 

 the same perception, presupposes, as we have seen, those repro- 

 ductive and recognitive acts in revival which are possible only where 

 uniformities of succession (and of coexistence) exist. Again, every 

 act of attention involved in identifying and discriminating, which 

 likewise we have seen to be possible only if we presuppose uniform- 

 ities in the given contents of perception, must necessarily disappear 

 when we presuppose the chaotic content; and yet they remain 

 essential to the very idea of such a chaos. A relationless chaos is 

 after all nothing else than a system of relations thought of without 

 relations! That the same contradiction obtains also in the mere 

 mental picturing of a manifold of chaotic impressions needs no 

 discussion; for the productive imagination as well as the reproduct- 

 ive is no less dependent than is our perceptive knowledge upon the 

 reproductive recognition and upon the processes of identifying and 

 discriminating. 



Thus the mental image of a chaos could be formed only through 

 an extended process of ideation, which itself presupposes as active 

 in it all that must be denied through the very nature of the image. 

 A relationless knowledge, a relationless abstraction, a relationless 



