of all objects of experience and of all natural
knowledge, their task was made easy by the native diversity between the
concretions in existence which were the object of their thought and the
concretions in discourse which were its measure. The two do not fit; and
intrenched as these philosophers were in the forms of logic they
compelled themselves to reject as unthinkable everything not fully
expressible in those particular forms. Thus they took their revenge upon
the vulgar who, being busy chiefly with material things and dwelling in
an atmosphere of sensuous images, call unreal and abstract every product
of logical construction or reflective analysis. These logical products,
however, are not really abstract, but, as we have seen, concretions
arrived at by a different method than that which results in material
conceptions. Whereas the conception of a thing is a local conglomerate
of several simultaneous sensations, logical entity is a homogeneous
revival in memory of similar sensations temporally distinct.

Thus the many armed with prejudice and the few armed with logic fight an
eternal battle, the logician charging the physical world with
unintelligibility and the man of common-sense charging the logical
world with abstractness and unreality. The former view is the more
profound, since association by similarity is the more elementary and
gives constancy to meanings; while the latter view is the more
practical, since association by contiguity alone informs the mind about
the mechanical sequence of its own experience. Neither principle can be
dispensed with, and each errs only in denouncing the other and wishing
to be omnivorous, as if on the one hand logic could make anybody
understand the history of events and the conjunction of objects, or on
the other hand as if cognitive and moral processes could have any other
terms than constant and ideal natures. The namable essence of things or
the standard of values must always be an ideal figment; existence must
always be an empirical fact. The former remains always remote from
natural existence and the latter irreducible to a logical principle.[C]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: This distinction, in one sense, is Platonic: but Plato's
Reason was distinguished from understanding (which dealt with phenomenal
experience) because it was a moral faculty defining those values and
meanings which in Platonic nomenclature took the title of reality. The
German Reason was only imagination