Naturally," because intelligence was
so largely contemplative, and vision so largely immediate, unanalyzed,
and diaphanous. There was, to be sure, the concept of effluxes. But
this was a statement of the fact of vision in terms of its results, not
of the process itself. Thus it was that the whole terminology of knowing
which we still use was moulded and fixed upon a very crude conception of
one of the constituents of its process. There can be no doubt that this
terminology has added much to the inertia against which the advance of
logical theory has worked. It would be interesting to see what would be
the effect upon logical theory of the substitution of an auditory or
olfactory terminology for visual; or of a visual terminology revised to
agree with modern scientific analysis of the _act_ of vision as
determined by its connections with other functions.

With the act of knowing stripped of its technique and left a bare,
unique, indescribable act or relation, the foundations for
epistemological and metaphysical logic were laid. That Greek logic
escaped the ravages of epistemology was due to the saving materialism in
its metaphysical conception of mind and to the steadfastness of the
aristocratic regime. But when medieval theology and Cartesian
metaphysics had destroyed the last remnant of metaphysical connection
between the knowing mind and nature, and when revolutions had torn the
individual from his social moorings, the stage for epistemological logic
was fully set. I do not mean to identify the epistemological situation
with the Cartesian disjunction. That disjunction was but the
metaphysical expression of the one which constitutes the real foundation
of epistemology--the disjunction, namely, between the act of knowing and
other acts.

From this point logic has followed one of two general courses. It has
sought continuity by attempting to reduce non-logical things and
operations to terms of logical operations, i.e., to sensations or
universals or both; or it has attempted to exclude entirely the act of
knowing from logic and to transfer logical distinctions and operations,
and even the attributes of truth and error to objects which,
significantly enough, are still composed of these same hypostatized
logical processes. The first course results in an epistemological logic
of some form of the idealistic tradition, rationalism, sensationalism,
or transcendentalism, depending upon whether universals, or sensations,
or a