Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/500

III. THE CONSTITUTION OF THOUGHT. BY DR. HUBERT FOSTON. WHEN we see how refined and apparently remote are those abstractions which our present science can use in the ex- planation of the concrete activities of objects, we may be constrained to confess that if intellection, as advancing to general thought, was ever supposed to have surrendered pied a terre in the sensible order of things, to explore a detached and ethereal world of its own, the abandonment was but seeming. We may feel that the achievements of applied science in our own day have furnished us with such a demonstration of a quite domestically mundane objectivity in thought as was undreamt of in the loftily leisured philo- sophies of antiquity. But if I touch on the working-day triumphs of thought, it is not in order to claim them for a mental functioning differentiated quite as psychology has persistently declared general thinking to be. So long as the theory of thought shall give chief prominence to a merely isolating abstraction, and a fruitlessly self-containing generalisation, we shall come short of an adequate explanation of the control which we obtain of what we may call the practical significances of objects taking an " object " merely as a presentation, and by its "significance" meaning now no more than that of which it is found in experience to be the signal, the anti- cipatory " sign "- 1 1 The anticipatory sign : for it may need to be somewhat carefully observed that with the closely related, perhaps more common, scientific- ally more complex, a posteriori meaning of the word, according to which an effect, for instance, is interpreted to be the (retrospective) " sign "- perhaps post-mortem of its cause, we have not primarily to do. Our outlook is forwards. If a certain sound is a sign of a bell being rung, it is so as a portion of the evidence on the ground of which we can con- structively proceed forward, from an assumed movement of the bell, to the sound again, and possibly to various probabilities of which the move- ment might be an initial sign. It is this forward look which is the matter of concern for our experience, and which lends motive and guid- ance to the retrospective view.