It is also alleged that conceptual thought fails to interpret adequately the relation of cause and effect. Professor James expresses this in his chapter on "Bergson and Intellectualism ": "Concepts, in the deeper sense of giving insight, have no theoretic value, for they quite fail to connect us with the inner life of the flux, or with the causes that govern its direction. Instead of being interpreters of reality, concepts negate the inwardness of reality altogether. They make the whole notion of a causal influence between finite things incomprehensible. No real activities and indeed no real connexions of any kind can obtain if we follow the conceptual logic; for to be distinguishable, according to what I call intellectualism, is to be incapable of connexion."[1]
Moreover, the logic which is under indictment, it is insisted, fails utterly to account for the acknowledged contradictory elements in our experience. While a conceptual logic by its very nature separates ideas one from another, and lays down lines of mutual exclusion, the actual experiences of life on the contrary continually force upon us the contradictory, the incompatible and the incongruous.
Such is the case against conceptual logic, and I believe most profoundly that these strictures arise from a misapprehension of the true function of logic. If it is the mechanical thing which these statements imply, not only knowledge of living processes and experiences would prove impossible, but any knowledge whatsoever,—of the flux of things, or of the forms of established solidity; of the phenomena of dynamic change, or those of static repose. In fact, the logic underlying the criticism is so far from superior to the logic that is the object of the criticism, as to indicate most conclusively that the logic under indictment is a logic falsely conceived, and is never employed in the actual processes of thought either critical or reflective. Intellectualism can be attacked only by the weapons of intellectualism itself; and the more successful the attack, the more conspicuous is its futility.
I believe that the processes of logic have a far wider scope, and a less mechanical function than these criticisms imply, and that as a matter of fact the activities of thought are actually akin to
- ↑ A Pluralistic Universe, p. 246 f.
