nal meanings; and the means by which they do so is always what is called “external experience.” No “pure thinking” can ever really prove a particular judgment about external objects. You have to appeal to outer experience. On the other hand, all empirical judgments about objects of external meaning, viewed merely as such, are, or should be, in this form of the particular judgments. It is a form at once positive and very unsatisfactorily indeterminate. It expresses the fact that there has been found some case where an A that is a B not only may exist, in yonder object with which we are to correspond, but does exist. The defect of these judgments is that they never tell us, by themselves, precisely what object this existent instance of an A that is B really is. In other words, they are particular, but are not individual judgments. Yet, as we shall hereafter more fully see, and have already in a measure observed, what we want our knowledge to show us about the Being of things, is what Reality, taken as an individual whole, or, again, as this individual, finally is. Hence, the particular judgments, — those of external experience viewed as external, — are especially instructive as to the nature that our ordinary thinking attributes to Being, and as to what we demand of our Other.[1]
- ↑ The assertion that purely ideal reasoning processes, viewed as mere internal meanings, never result in particular propositions about their external objects, is one extensively discussed by Schroeder and by many others. See Schroeder, Algebra der Logik, Bd. II, p. 86, sqq. The defence of the assertion in detail, as a matter of formal Logic, would here take us too far afield. Speaking briefly, one can remind the reader, by the use of a familiar example: (1) That unless wisdom is conceived necessarily to follow from the nature of man, you cannot, by “mere reasoning,” find out whether or no any man is wise, so long as man is taken to be an external object. You have to turn to “external experience.” If, in experience, you then find somebody say Socrates to be a wise man, the matter is empirically settled in favor of the judgment: Some man is wise. But, (2) on the other hand, even in case wisdom followed, as an ideally necessary result, from the mere nature of man, then you would know indeed, by mere reasoning, that if any man exists at all, that man is wise. But apart from the “external experience” itself, you would still fail to know, through the “pure ideas,” whether there exists indeed any man at all. And you still could not assert, despite your reasoning, the truth of the proposition that some man is wise, until you had first found that man exists in the realm of the external meanings. All this is an inevitable consequence of the sundering between the internal and the external meanings; and holds true so long as the sundering is insisted upon. The traditional Logic of the text-books, when it reasons from universals to their subalternate particulars, or derives particular conclusions from universal premises, does so by tacitly and, in general, by unjustifiably assuming the external existence of the objects reasoned about, while all the time still sundering external and internal. Reasoning itself is, to be sure, experience, but is, by hypothesis, experience of internal meanings, not of the external meanings which are taken, by this sort of thinking, to be the Reality.
