Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/161

NEW SERIES. No. 22.] [APRIL, 1897. MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. I. SOME PROBLEMS OF CONCEPTION. 1 BY L. T. HOBHOUSE. I. The Data of Conception. Thought, as modern Logic has taught us, is something which lives and moves. It does not rest in one point nor content itself with ' net results,' but is in incessant passage to something beyond. And in trying to estimate its work at any given stage, we are con- tinually faced by the difficulty that what is before us is merely a stage, and its purpose and meaning are to be understood only with reference to some wider whole. Thus the conceptions and judgments in which the work of thought seems at first sight rounded off and complete appear on further reflexion to change their meaning and value a good deal according to the interest which has dictated their formation. We have constantly to take the context into account and the context often threatens to be of indefinite length. This difficulty applies with especial force to an element of thought so confessedly incomplete as conception. For the concept is as a rule a mere element in some actual mental operation, such as judgment, while the judgment is deter- mined by a question, or is premiss in an argument and as such has elements of meaning which its terms do not in themselves convey. If then we are to deal with conception at all without writing an essay upon thought in general, there seems to be only one resource. We must go back from 1 Read before the Aristotelian Society. 10