The External World 247 



each must have its hand linked with that of the thou2;ht 

 which begot it ; it must have a ' fringe ' if it is to get a 

 lodgement upon the strings of my intellectual loom and 

 stand a chance of being woven into the texture of the 

 carpet which is to cover the upper floor of my mental resi- 

 dence. The burden of mental progress, then, seems to me 

 to lie on the side of the organizing function. 



We may believe, therefore, so far as we have gone, that 

 the material available for selective thinking is only of the 

 sort which reflects rearrangements, new adjustments — in 

 short, new 'determinations' — in our organized systems of 

 knowledge; and further that each of such candidates for 

 selection is born, so to speak, at the top of the cone, at the 

 highest floor or level, of its own peculiar system. Other 

 fragments of thought, disjecta membra of imagination, lie 

 scattered about the bottom, unavailable and useless. With 

 so much said about the material, we may now go on to 

 consider the function or process of selective thinking. 



§ 5. The Function or Process of Mental Selection: the 

 External World 



In the consideration of this problem — of course, the 

 most important one — the advantages of employing the 

 genetic method will become apparent ; and it may be well 

 to distinguish the different spheres of mental determina- 

 tion somewhat in the order of their original genetic appear- 

 ance, the first sphere being that of our knowledge of the 

 external world. 



I. The function here is evidently one of an organization 

 of the data of sensation in a way wliich shall reflect, for our 

 practical purposes, the actual state of things existing in 



