The necessity for such selection no intellectualist theory of Induction has understood.  All have aimed at exhaustiveness, and imagined that if it could be attained, inductive reasoning would be rendered sound, and not impossible.  Their ideal ‘cause’ was the totality of reality, identified with its ‘effect,’ in a meaningless tautology.  Nothing but voluntarism can enable logicians to see that our actual procedure in knowing is the reverse of this, that causal explanation is the analysis of a continuum, and that ‘phenomena,’ ‘events,’ ‘effects,’ and ‘causes’ are all creations of our selective attention; that in selecting them we run a risk of analyzing falsely, and that if we do, our ‘inductions’ will be worthless.  But whether they are right or wrong, valuable or not, real reasoning from ‘facts’ can never be a ’formally valid’ process.

We are thus brought to see the hollowness of the contention that ’Pure Reason’ can ignore its psychological context and dehumanize itself.  A thought, to be thought at all, must seem worth thinking to someone, it must convey the meaning he intends, it must be true in his eyes and relevant to his purposes in the situation in which it arises—­i.e., it must have a motive, a value, a meaning, a purpose, a context, and be selected from a greater whole for its relevance to these.  None of these features does intellectualist logic deign to recognize.  For if truth is absolute and not relative, it is all or nothing.  Yet no actual thinking has such transcendent aims.  It is content with selections relative to a concrete situation.  If it were permissible to diversify a debate—­e.g., about the authorship of the Odyssey—­by an irruption of undisputed truths—­e.g., a recitation of the multiplication table—­how would it be possible to distinguish a philosopher from a lunatic?

Formal Logic is either a perennial source of errors about real thinking, or at best an aimless dissection of a caput mortuum—­i.e., of the verbal husks of dead thoughts, whose value Formal Logic could neither establish nor apprehend, A real Logic, therefore, would most anxiously avoid all the initial abstractions which have reduced Formal Logic to such impotence, and would abandon the insane attempt to eliminate the thinker from the theory of thought.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote F:  The descriptive science of thought, in its concrete actuality in different minds.]

[Footnote G:  The most popular contribution which Oxford makes just now to the theory of Error is, ’A judgment which is erroneous is not really a judgment.’  So when a professor ‘judges’ he is infallible—­by definition!]

CHAPTER VII

THE BANKRUPTCY OF INTELLECTUALISM