truth has errors
for its constituent elements? Such paradoxes have always delighted the
soul of absolute idealism. But, as we have seen, only the veil of an
infinitesimal finitude intervenes between the logic of the objective
universal of absolute idealism and the objective logic of analytic
realism.

It is, of course, this predicament regarding objective truth and error
that has driven most analytic logicians to recall the exiled
psychological, "mental" act of knowing. It had to be recalled to provide
some basis of distinction between truth and error, but, this act having
already been conceived as incurably "subjective," the result is only an
exchange of dilemmas. For the reinstatement of this act _ipso facto_
reinstates the epistemological predicament to get rid of which it was
first banished from logic.

Earnest efforts to escape this outcome have been made by attaching the
act of knowing to the nervous system, and this is a move in the right
direction. But so far the effort has been fruitless because no
connection has been made between the knowing function of the nervous
system and its other functions. The result is that the cognitive
operation of the nervous system, as of the "psychical" mind, is that of
a mere spectator; and the epistemological problem abides. An onlooking
nervous system has no advantage over an "onlooking" mind. Onlooking,
beholding may indeed be a part of a genuine act of knowing. But in that
act it is always a stimulus or response to other acts. It is one of
them;--never a mere spectator of them. It is when the act of knowing is
cut off from its connection with other acts and finds itself adrift that
it seeks metaphysical lodgings. And this it may find either in an empty
psychical mind or in an equally empty body.[33]

If, in reinstating the act of knowing as a function of the nervous
system, neo-realism had recognized the logical significance of the fact
that the nervous system of which knowing is a function is the same
nervous system of which loving and hating, desiring and striving are
functions and that the transition from these to the operations of
inquiry and knowing is not a capricious jump but a transition motived by
the loving and hating, desiring and striving--if this had been
recognized the logic of neo-realism would have been spared its
embarrassments over the distinction of truth and error. It would have
seen that the passage from loving and hating, desiring and striving to
in