aning, in
its relation to what is meant. In any case the achievement of symbolic
logic, with its indefinables and axioms has been to reduce this logic to
a statement of the most generalized form of possible consistent thought
intercourse, with entire abstraction from the content of the object to
which it refers. If, however, we abstract from its value in giving a
consistent theory of number, continuity, and infinity, this complete
abstraction from the content has carried the conditions of thinking in
agreement with self and others so far away from the actual problem of
science that symbolic logic has never been used as a research method. It
has indeed emphasized the fact that thinking deals with problems which
have reference to uses to which it can be put, not to a metaphysical
world lying beyond experience. Symbolic logic has to do with the world
of discourse, not with the world of things.

What Russell pushes to one side as a happy guess is the actual process
of implication by which, for example, the minute form in the diseased
human system is identified with unicellular life and the history of the
disease with the life history of this form. This identification implies
reclassification of these forms and a treatment of the disease that
answers to their life history. Having made this identification we
anticipate the result of this treatment, calling it an inference.

Implication belongs to the reconstruction of the object. As long as no
question has arisen, the object is what it means or means what it is. It
does not imply any feature of itself. When through conflict with the
experience of the individual some feature of the object is divorced from
some meaning the relationship between these becomes a false implication.
When a hypothetically reconstructed object finds us anticipating a
result which accords with the nature of such objects we assert an
implication of this meaning. To carry this relation of implication back
into objects which are subject to no criticism or question would of
course resolve the world into elements connected by external relations,
with the added consequence that these elements can have no content,
since every content in the face of such an analysis must be subject to
further analysis. We reach inevitably symbols such as X, Y, and Z, which
can symbolize nothing. Theoretically we can assume an implication
between any elements of an object, but in this abstract assumption the
symbolic logician