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
defin