not thereby completely explained. There must be taken into account that curious additional aspect of his life in which he forms part of a larger whole: part, moreover, in a way that cannot be expressed through the quantitative relations applicable to external facts. And what applies to man thus regarded as practical applies in the same way to the whole facts of the inner life. Thus it is that in Comte's later work -the Positive Politics-he offers an amended classification of the sciences, in which the grouping is broadly into (1) the Cosmological and (2) the Sociological, while Biology is given a fluctuating position between Cosmology and Sociology.1

VIII. Form and Matter.-The general position which I have assumed throughout might be expressed in the technical language of philosophy as the impossibility of severing form and matter. So general a statement, no doubt, is applicable to many other subjects than thinking. In special reference to thought, however, it implies that, even in what we are able reflectively to distinguish as the general structure of thinking, contrasting it thereby with the particular applications of thought, it is not possible to understand its definite character except by taking into account the material of experience.

Such a general position is indeed one of the deductions. that may be drawn from the Kantian work in philosophy. For, though Kant allows too much of the opposition between form and matter to remain in his system, though such residuum constitutes really the ambiguous, the baffling, element in his treatment of experience, yet in what he called Transcendental Logic, as opposed to purely Formal Logic, we have the first recognition that thought has a significance other than the purely formal. No doubt Kant did try in a half-hearted way to keep the categories of real knowledge in exclusive connexion with the thinking subject, and thereby 1 [Cf. System of Positive Polity, i. 463, 473.]

to oppose them to the foreign matter which somehow fell into correlation with them. But, when we consider the actual character of these categories - their content-the impossibility of deducing them from a mere abstract selfconsciousness becomes apparent. And, though Kant acknowledges only in his own peculiar fashion that the self-consciousness he is dealing with is concrete, though he prefers to describe its consciousness of unity and identity in time as rather an accident thrust upon it by the material of experience than essential in the pure notion of self-consciousness, yet it certainly appears that these categorieshowever general, however abstract, they may be have meaning only as expressing the ways in which a real concrete subject attains consciousness of itself in the sensuous experience with its conditions of space and time. There is no ultimate justification for that constant antithesis which Kant brings forward between the pure generality of thought and the indeterminate particular of perception-an antithesis which, as we have seen, gives to his theory of knowledge its rather mechanical character.

Now, the general position from which thinking has been here regarded is no more than the legitimate development of what is contained in the Kantian work. Thinking in its developed structure is throughout determined by the concrete material of experience within which it makes its appearance. It follows from this that there cannot be, in the structure and generalised products of thought, that difference in kind which Kant establishes as between categories and Ideas. The difference, which may no doubt exist, among the thoughts which form the connected structure of our consciousness can express no more than a difference of content. It cannot be that in the one we find what is perfectly adapted to experience, while in the other we find that to which experience can never conform.

312

CHAPTER VII.

CONCLUSION.

IN conclusion, I purpose pointing out one special application of this general mode of regarding the nature of thought. The character of what we call a notion is not to be determined by a mere reference to that generality which it obtains through the natural conditions rendering abstraction possible. Generality of this crude kind is neither the exclusive mark of thought nor what gives notions their main value as ways of organising experience. A notion embodies the apprehended features of what is in the concrete presented in perceptive experience, inner and outer. As such perceptive experience is at first given in all its complication of detail, as the human mind is able only gradually to bring to bear on it notions by which it may be analysed and interpreted, so it is natural to assume that our first primary notions will contain but an inadequate representation of what truly determines the constant character of perceptive experience. Our first notions undoubtedly will be moulded upon the prominent, but not therefore the most important, features of perceptive experience. Among such first primary notions a type of fundamental importance is the practical. The relation between the concrete individual, as a source of changes in his surroundings, and the consequences which follow from his action, is so constant in our experience that it cannot be without effect in determining the thinking con

sideration of things, the general representation we form of them.

Primitive thinking naturally represents concrete objects as having the same complex structure as the subject himself, and as giving rise to changes in the same way as the subject is aware of acting. Undoubtedly the primitive representation of a causal connexion is always anthropomorphic: the agency is conceived of as the action of some subject.

Moreover, in the action of such a subject it is easy to distinguish what may fairly be called the mechanical side from the relatively more subjective, that in which purpose or intention is prevailingly manifested. The mechanical side connects itself most closely with bodily effort; and the change produced is vaguely represented as the overcoming of resistance by muscular energy. The type of all action is for the primitive mind the initiation of movement by muscular effort; and even our most developed notions of action continue to carry with them much of this primitive. representation.

On the other hand, distinct from that and more complex in character, is the representation of means and end, on the use of which experience soon imposes a limitation. Not indeed that, even in developed thinking, we are very clearly aware of the precise scope of such a representation; for we still continue to interpret to ourselves at least some processes of the external world by the help of the representation of purpose, of final end; and the all-embracing scope of this notion in our own personal practical life finds its counterpart in the continual tendency to represent after the same fashion the whole content of experience.

Now, in this set of primitive notions there is implied a representation of individual facts-individual, despite the multiplicity they involve-wholly distinct from that refined analytical conception of the isolated unit of event or fact

which is the product of a wide knowledge and of repeated experience. These individuals, living conscious beings, are taken as individual, and form indeed the final standard by which in developed thinking we test the claims of any part of experience to recognition as an individual. It is only by degrees that we come to admit as having a certain right to individuality what is merely distinguished from its surroundings by some qualitative peculiarity, or even by mere numerical difference.

Thus the natural history of our thinking pursues an order just the reverse of that which we would now put forward in the light of our developed experience. We now tend to think of the ultimate units of our experience, that which can be presented, let us say, in the indivisible moment of perception, as the individual; and it causes us some perplexity to understand the grounds on which we claim, and insist on, individuality for what is in itself or in one aspect a multiplicity, a combination of such units. But, in the natural order of thinking, it is the complex individual with which we start; and it is not therefore surprising that, in the earliest analysis of thinking-the Greek, and pre-eminently Aristotle's the individual should mean the numerically distinct member of a natural class: a 'natural class' meaning always a highly complex concrete order of perceived existences.

The subjects in such natural order of thought are at first the more concrete; nor does our thinking consideration of things ever lose the impress which is exhibited with such clearness in its earlier stages. We still represent the concrete combinations by thoughts or notions, which are in themselves of a more definite, more organised, content than our representations of the isolated units presented in space and time. Even when, using the results of our developed knowledge, we explain to ourselves these concrete forms