This abbreviated presentation of the so-called fundamental laws 

 of thought is not so much a prescribed form, obtained in some ex 

 cathedra way, and imposed upon scientific procedure in a manner 

 somewhat analogous to the way in which the categories of Kant 

 have been supposed to be imposed upon sense-data, but rather it is a 

 presentation of what occurs in every single scientific procedure 

 regarding any matters-of-fact whatsoever. The task of logic is 

 simply to represent this procedure, that which actually occurs 

 in the progress of science, in a schematic or symbolical form. It is 

 to be regretted that too often logic has been regarded as providing 

 a canon which scientific knowledge should and must follow, where- 

 as, in fact, logic can only obtain such a canon from the actual course 

 of scientific knowledge itself. These laws of thought then are sim- 

 ply that which is common to all sciences however diverse may seem 

 to be the matter with which they are concerned. And philosophy, 

 when once it exhibits such common principles, has already made a 

 step, and a great step, toward a unified view of the world. 



Of course this is only what might be called a splendid beginning, 

 for we have still to do with to follow an ancient usage what is 

 called the matter of science, in other words, its content, as dis- 

 tinguished from the principles of thought outlined above. Here we 

 have the question, what are, then, the contents of the various 

 sciences. In other words what are the matters-of-fact with which 

 they deal. 



But still further, there arises out of the foregoing another 

 question, viz., whether or not human thinking, investigating 

 matters-of-fact according to the laws of thought, can predicate 

 anything not found in such a content nor in such laws but to which 

 both that content and those laws are supposed to be somehow 

 related. This is the question of the transcendent, The articula- 

 tion of these three questions into a system constitutes the task of 

 philosophy. 



To work out in detail anything like an answer to these would 

 be entirely beyond the projected task of this thesis, since such a 

 working out would be the presentation, in detail, of a system of 

 philosophy. Such an attempt would be presumptuous within the 

 limits of a work which has regarded as its main purpose the attempt to 

 discover what, in the history and present stage of human know- 



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