in TRUTH 53 



And (V) if the cohesion of our thoughts, the belonging 

 together, e.g. of A B, were not immediately felt, but had to 

 be established by mediate reasoning, it would follow that 

 for any two truths to cohere a reason would have to be 

 alleged why they should do so. But this would have to 

 be another truth, and the attempt to understand the 

 immediate psychical cohesion would have to be renewed 

 upon this, until it became obvious that an infinite process 

 was implicit in the simplest inference. 1 Is it not much 

 more reasonable to suppose that the cohesiveness is a 

 psychical feature of the thinking itself? Finally (d] it 

 would seem that not every sort of coherence in thought 

 was regarded as logically important. The sort of 

 coherences, e.g. which proceed from associations and 

 lead to puns and plays upon words are relegated to that 

 undignified limbo in which fallacies are huddled together. 

 But if not all coherence is logical, then the logician 

 plainly needs a preliminary psychology to distinguish for 

 him the kind of coherence which is his concern. 



(3) If logic is to make the attempt to exclude 

 psychology, the real cause of logical coherence must be 

 pronounced to be extralogical. For it is nothing that 

 can plausibly be represented 2 as inherent in the nature of 

 thought qua thought, i.e. of thought as logicians abstractly 

 conceive it. The cause of logical coherence may be 

 summed up in the one word interest, and thought 

 which is not set in motion by interest does not issue in 

 thinking at all. If, therefore, interest is to be tabooed, the 

 whole theory of thought becomes a mere mass of useless 

 machinery. For it is interest which starts, propels, 



This is too much, and we usually prefer to reconsider the thought that has ended 

 in a contradiction. Moreover, if we desire to entertain contradictory beliefs, there 

 is a much easier way ; we have merely to refuse to think them together. This 

 indeed is what the great majority of men have always done. 



1 For an amusing illustration of this existence of an immediate apprehension 

 in all mediate cogency see Lewis Carroll s dialogue between Achilles and the 

 Tortoise in Mind, N.S. No. 14, p. 278. 



2 I am willing to suppose it just possible to translate all the features of our 

 thinking into a completely and consistently intellectualist phraseology. Philo 

 sophers have made endless attempts to do so, but none have succeeded, though it 

 is I suppose a merit of Hegel s to have tried more elaborately, and to have failed 

 more obscurely, than the rest. But the philosophers insistence on reducing 

 everything to pure thought is merely one of their professional prejudices. 



