5/8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



schools would be to say that they seek to explain the forms of con- 

 sciousness by means of its materials. 



Now, to another class of minds any such attempt seems so prepos- 

 terously absurd that they pour out the child with the bath, and disdain 

 even a modest ambition which should content itself with tracing out 

 in the jungle of the mind a few of the trails by which its materials 

 are brought together. As this article is born of the latter ambition, 

 and as its author thinks he has succeeded in making the trails broader 

 and smoother than previous writers have left them, it behooves him to 

 defend himself and his purpose by a few preliminary words addressed 

 'to this class of critics. They are recruited mainly from the school of 

 Hegel, but we find even as fertile and acute a writer as Lotze sharing 

 their prejudices and negations in this respect. 



The intuition they start from is that thought is not a sand-heap of 

 juxtaposed images with associating links outside of them and between 

 them. It is a unitary continuum of which the items, and the logical 

 relations between the items, form alike integral parts, equally imbed- 

 ded, equally essential, equally interdependent. Any relation may 

 carry us from one item to another, and according as we follow one or 

 the other relation we shall traverse the field of -thought in this way or 

 in that, have one train of images or its opposite. But all the relations 

 are logical, are relations of reason. A thing may suggest its like, or 

 its opposite, its genus or its species, its cause or its effect, its means or 

 its purpose, its habitual neighbors in space or in time, its possibilities 

 or its impossibilities, its changes or its resistance to change — in short, 

 it may call up every consideration to which it can have a possible logi- 

 cal relevancy, and call up each in its turn. And the only summary 

 formula that can be applied to all these infinite possibilities of transi- 

 tion is that, as transitions of Thought, they are all alike .acts of Reason. 

 This monotonous appeal to " Thought " with a capital T and Reason 

 with a capital R is apt to irritate the ear of him bent on analysis, very 

 much as the stereotyped " Allah is great " of the Mussulman irritates 

 the ear of the scientific traveler. It is true enough, but sterile. And, 

 when it interdicts discrimination and the search for secondary causes, 

 it performs as obstructive a function as that of our dear old friend the 

 dog in the manger. 



For these so-called " transitions of Reason " are far from being all 

 alike reasonable. If pure Thought runs all our trains, why should she 

 run some so fast and some so slow, some through dull flats and some 

 through gorgeous scenery, some to mountain-heights and jeweled 

 mines, others through dismal swamps and darkness ? — and run some 

 off the track altogether, and into the wilderness of lunacy ? Why 

 do we spend years straining after a certain scientific or jDractical prob- 

 lem, but all in vain — Thought refusing to evoke the solution we desire ? 

 And why, some day, walking in the street with our attention miles 

 away from that quest, does the answer saunter into our minds as care- 



