If coexistence as such is to be set over against coherence as such, as the non-logical against the logical, then, since our whole spatial universe is one of collocation, and since thought in this universe can never get farther than substituting one collocation for another, the whole realm of space-experience is condemned off-hand and in perpetuity to anti-rationality. But, in truth, coincidence as over against coherence, conjunction as over against connection, is just suspected coherence, one which is under the fire of active inquiry. The distinction is one which arises only within the grasp of the logical or reflective function.
3. This brings us explicitly to the fact that there is no such thing as either coincidence or coherence in terms of the elements or meanings contained in any couple or pair of ideas taken by itself. It is only when they are co-factors in a situation or function which includes more than either the "coincident" or the "coherent" and more than the arithmetical sum of the two, that thought's activity can be evoked. Lotze is continually in this dilemma: Thought either shapes its own material or else just accepts it. In the first case (since Lotze cannot rid himself of the presumption that thought must have a fixed ready-made antecedent) its activity can only alter this stuff and thus lead the mind farther away from reality. But if thought just accepts its material, how can there be any distinctive aim or activity of thought at all? As we have seen, Lotze endeavors to escape this dilemma by supposing that, while thought receives its material, it yet checks it up: it eliminates certain portions of it and reinstates others, plus the stamp and seal of its own validity.
Lotze objects most strenuously to the notion that thought awaits its subject-matter with certain ready-made modes of apprehension. This notion would raise the insoluble question of how thought contrives to bring the matter of each impression under that particular form which is appropriate to it (Vol. I, p. 24). But he has not really avoided the difficulty. How does thought know which of the combinations are merely coincident and which are merely coherent? How does it know which to eliminate as irrelevant and which to confirm as grounded? Either this evaluation is an imposition of its own, or else gets its cue and clue from the subject-matter. Now, if the coincident and the coherent taken in and of themselves are competent to give this direction, they are already practically labeled. The further work of thought is one of supererogation. It has at most barely to note and seal the material combinations that are already there. Such a view clearly renders thought's work as unnecessary in form as it is futile in force.
But there is no alternative in this dilemma except to recognize that an entire situation of experience, within which are both that afterward found to be mere coincidence and that found to be real connection, actually provokes thought. It is only as an experience previously accepted comes up in its wholeness against another one equally integral; and only as some larger experience dawns which requires each as a part of itself and yet within which the required factors show themselves mutually incompatible, that thought arises. It is not bare coincidence, or bare connection, or bare addition of one to the other, that excites thought. It is a situation which is organized or constituted as a whole, and which yet is falling to pieces in its parts—a situation which is in conflict within itself—that arouses the search to find what really goes together and a correspondent effort to shut out what only seemingly belongs together. And real coherence means precisely capacity to exist within the comprehending whole. It is a case of the psychologist's fallacy to read back into the preliminary situation those distinctions of mere conjunction of material and of valid relationship which get existence, to say nothing of fixation, only within the thought-process.
We must not leave this phase of the discussion, however, until it is quite clear that our objection is not to Lotze's position that reflective thought arises from an antecedent which is not reflectional in character; nor yet to his idea that this antecedent has a certain structure and content of its own setting the peculiar problem which evokes thought and gives the cue to its specific activities. On the contrary, it is this latter point upon which we would insist; and, by insisting, point out, negatively, that this view is absolutely inconsistent with Lotze's theory that psychical impressions and ideas are the true antecedents of thought; and, positively, that it is the situation as a whole, and not any one isolated part of it, or distinction within it, that calls forth and directs thinking. We must beware the fallacy of assuming that some one element in the prior situation in isolation or detachment induces the thought which in reality comes forth only from the whole disturbed situation. On the negative side, characterizations of impression and idea (whether as mental contents or as psychical existences) are distinctions which arise only within reflection upon the situation which is the genuine antecedent of thought; while the distinction of psychical existences from external existences arises only within a highly elaborate technical reflection—that of the psychologist as such.[12] Positively, it is the whole dynamic experience with its qualitative and pervasive identity of value, and its inner distraction, its elements at odds with each other, in tension against each other, contending each for its proper placing and relationship, that generates the thought-situation.
From this point of view, at this period of development, the distinctions of objective and subjective have a characteristic meaning. The antecedent, to repeat, is a situation in which the various factors are actively incompatible with each other, and which yet in and through the striving tend to a re-formation of the whole and to a restatement of the parts. This situation as such is clearly objective. It is there; it is there as a whole; the various parts are there; and their active incompatibility with one another is there. Nothing is conveyed at this point by asserting that any particular part of the situation is illusory or subjective, or mere appearance; or that any other is truly real. It is the further work of thought to exclude some of the contending factors from membership in experience, and thus to relegate them to the sphere of the merely subjective. But just at this epoch the experience exists as one of vital and active confusion and conflict. The conflict is not only objective in a de facto sense (that is, really existent), but is objective in a logical sense as well; it is just this conflict which effects the transition into the thought-situation—this, in turn, being only a constant movement toward a defined equilibrium. The conflict has objective logical value because it is the antecedent condition and cue of thought.
Every reflective attitude and function, whether of naïve life, deliberate invention, or controlled scientific research, has risen through the medium of some such total objective situation. The abstract logician may tell us that sensations or impressions, or associated ideas, or bare physical things, or conventional symbols, are antecedent conditions. But such statements cannot be verified by reference to a single instance of thought in connection with actual practice or actual scientific research. Of course, by extreme mediation symbols may become conditions of evoking thought. They get to be objects in an active experience. But they are stimuli only in case their manipulation to form a new whole occasions resistance, and thus reciprocal tension. Symbols and their definitions develop to a point where dealing with them becomes itself an experience, having its own identity; just as the handling of commercial commodities, or arrangement of parts of an invention, is an individual experience. There is always as antecedent to thought an experience of some subject-matter of the physical or social world, or organized intellectual world, whose parts are actively at war with each other—so much so that they threaten to disrupt the entire experience, which accordingly for its own maintenance requires deliberate re-definition and re-relation of its tensional parts. This is the reconstructive process termed thinking: the reconstructive situation, with its parts in tension and in such movement toward each other as tends to a unified experience, is the thought-situation.
This at once suggests the subjective phase. The situation, the experience as such, is objective. There is an experience of the confused and conflicting tendencies. But just what in particular is objective, just what form the situation shall take as an organized harmonious whole, is unknown; that is the problem. It is the uncertainty as to the what of the experience together with the certainty that there is such an experience, that evokes the thought-function. Viewed from this standpoint of uncertainty, the situation as a whole is subjective. No particular content or reference can be asserted off-hand. Definite assertion is expressly reserved—it is to be the outcome of the procedure of reflective inquiry now undertaken. This holding off of contents from definitely asserted position, this viewing them as candidates for reform, is what we