is passed over for the present: it seems clear that it is a distinction within a single point of view, both falling within the vision of the thinker himself and being distinct from that which a spectator, occupying the psychological standpoint, notes as the elements and laws of the temporal act of thinking. The same ambiguity attaches to the word, experience, when the act of experiencing is confused with what is experienced. In both cases the two meanings are inseparable aspects of a single process, and neither apart from the other is more than a one-sided abstraction:[1] for the psychological standpoint is that of an external spectator, and it is obvious that a spectator does not see all that there is unless he apprehends the content present to the subject himself; and, on the other hand, the subject’s own knowledge is limited if the psychological aspect, the process of the content, is beyond his view. At the same time the aspects are not to be identified in a crude and immediate fashion. Whether or not either attitude is capable of including the other—a point we need not determine at present—it is clear that in the ordinary case the process apprehended by the psychologist and the content apprehended by the subject are widely different; and one must avoid filling up gaps in the analysis of one side by material borrowed from the other without a definite justification. In our question the term, thought or thinking, refers to the content of thought, to that which is apprehended; and the problem concerns the possibility of stating the fundamental laws of apprehending thought in complete isolation from that which is apprehended; in other words, the independence of logic.
The independence of logic may be maintained in two ways. On the one hand the ambiguity of the term, thought, may be exploited, and psychological laws of the order of thoughts in time may be offered as logic. This device hardly needs criticism. The other method is to draw a sharp line between the content of thought and the ‘real’ object, and to declare that the content—all thought-forms as such—is subjective. This is, for example, Lotze’s method in logic. The fundamental objection to the procedure is that it involves a dualism between knowledge and reality, which makes knowledge possible only by an unending miracle. If all the forms of thought are subjective, if its modes of connexion answer to
