animal as the somnambulist apprehends his acts in the state of sleep. The attempts of the individual to solve a new situation may represent the painful beginning of a new racial experience. Instinct is specific, impersonal, infallible. Conscious intelligence, on the other hand, only arranges the fund of experience of a lifetime. It is personal, fallible, and variable. Instinct is conservative; conscious intelligence lives through innovation. The individual becomes personalized in the measure in which conscience extends in, and automatically opposes itself to, the impersonal experiences of the species. The vital imperative cannot, however, be actualized in the conscious intelligence as in instinctive acts which have become perfectly adapted by natural selection. Conscience therefore cannot be implicitly virtuous. Hence the necessity of morality, which tends to formulate explicitly those laws of the vital imperative which exist objectively and actuate us. Progress is the adaptation of customs and legislation to the new laws which the vital imperative dictates. It is worth while, then, to try to investigate these laws for the purpose of adaptation and to seek the means of making all individuals capable of conforming to them. The moral individual is one skilled in the art of living his life in conformity with his own imperative. Our imperative aspiration is, however, only an episode in the universal life the significance of which we ought first to comprehend.
The thinker cannot escape the psychological conditions of thought, one of which is that thought is an essentially contemplative function, which, at least at the level of philosophic thinking, consciously detaches itself from object-matter. Only through thought can any non-intellectual elements of experience be known. In the perplexity of experience, thought is both a part and a necessary factor in ensuring that future shall differ from past or present in such ways as to come within the scope of human volition. Any of the states of consciousness, when conceived as actually passing, may be termed a process-content: process refers to a peculiar relation to the past course of life; content, to a general relation of sameness of quality. Empirical imagination of particular forms is the fundamental stratum of thought as experience; but this gives no data to science or to philosophy, except as it causes descriptive propositions containing general ideas. Notion may mean a distinguished content of thought or a particular process-content of intellectual experience. A notion, then, is a specimen of some idea. The thoughts actually experienced are always made up of notions as such, and never of ideas as such. Language is evidently a collective product and possession. All truly typical ideas and the ideal science of which they form elements belong to the life of humanity. The purpose of an idea, for science or for philosophy, is to be true to some reality. All truth involves an essentially duomodal relation—that of a true symbol to reality; but this does not mean a relation of categorical agreement. Graphic
