I hope, be apparent that the purpose of this discussion has not been to take issue with Professor Dewey’s view of the nature of thought and its function in experience. Rather, I have tried to point out minor points of detail in which, perhaps only through misplaced emphasis, the treatment of reflection in How We Think presents a systematic restatement of prior logical analyses which seem to belong in any working-out of the subject. Or, from another point of view, my purpose has been to indicate possible modifications in Professor Dewey’s account of thought that may promote a more fruitful inter- action of psyehology and logic. I have tried to suggest, e.g., in ‘‘di- reetion of experiment to crucial instances,’’ an objective form of definition for what he calls ‘‘profundity”’ or ‘‘depth’’ in conjecture. Or, more generally, to indicate, however inadequately, a method of transforming the results of logic into a shape relevant to the pur- poses of psychological investigation, and vice versa. It is no unim- portant part of the instrumentalist contention that psychology and logie are essentially related, and that progress in either one depends upon progress in the other. All the more important is it that no view, no analysis, should be accepted in either field that may block the traffic between them.
Laurence BuERMEYER, Princeton, N. J.
The Metaphysical Monist as a Sociological Pluralist[1]
The main purpose of this brief paper is to stress the fact that one may hold the numerically monistic conception of the universe as Absolute, and even as Absolute Self or Person, without thereby committing oneself to the conception of the social group as literally a person or self, a “being with a mind of its own.”[2] There is, to be sure, a sense in which the conception of the social group as a self may be said to be facilitated by the Absolute-Self-doctrine. For if the universe is rightly conceived as One Self, including all the unnumbered lesser selves of the universe, there is apparent reason for describing races, societies, communities each as a sort of intermediate self of many interrelated persons. (The conception of a self as including selves is familiar to us not merely through the accumulating accounts of “subconscious” and “co-conscious” selves, but through the facts of the moral experience, the battling of “lower” against “higher” self, for example.) So far, however, the argument for
