Doubtless the attempt to make all perceptions, memories, and anticipations, and even instincts and habits, into implicit or subconscious inference is an awkward effort to restore the continuity of logical and non-logical conduct. Its awkwardness consists in attempting to secure this continuity by the method of subsumptive identity, instead of finding it in a transitive continuity of function;--instead of seeing that perception, memory, and anticipation _become_ logical processes when they are employed in a process of inquiry, whose purpose is to relieve the difficulties into which these operations in their function as direct stimuli have fallen. Logical conduct is constituted by the coöperation of these processes for the improvement of their further operation. To regard perception, memory, and imagination as implicit forms or as sub-species of logical operation is much like conceiving the movements of our fingers and arms as implicit or imperfect species of painting, or swimming.
Moreover, this doctrine of universal logicism teaches that when that which is perfect is come, imperfection shall be done away. This should mean that when painting becomes completely "explicit" and perfect, fingers and hands shall disappear. Perfect painting will be the pure essence of painting. And this interpretation is not strained; for this logic expressly teaches that in the perfected real system all temporal elements are unessential to logical operations. They are, of course, _psychologically_ necessary for finite beings, who can never have perfectly logical experiences. But, from the standpoint of a completely logicized experience, all finite, temporal processes are accidents, not essentials, of logical operations.
The fact that the processes of perception, memory, and anticipation are transformed in their logical operation into sensations and universals, terms, and relations, and, as such, become the subject-matter of logical theory, does not mean that they have lost their mediating character, and have become merely objects of logical contemplation at large. Sensations or sense-data, and ideas, terms and relations, are the subject-matter of logical theory for the reason that they sometimes succeed and sometimes fail in their logical operations. And it is the business of logical theory to diagnose the conditions of this success and failure. If, in writing, my pen becomes defective and is made an object of inquiry, it does not therefore lose all its character as a pen and become merely an object at large. It is _as_ an instrument of writing that it is investigated. So, sense-data, universals, terms, and relations as subject-matter of logic are investigated in their character _as_ mediators of the ambiguities and conflicts, of non-logical experience.