xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 199 



(4) The reality of the higher reality must be made to 

 depend throughout on its efficiency. This follows implicitly 

 from what we have already established. Immediate 

 experience forms the touchstone whereby we test the 

 value of our inferred realities, and if they can contribute 

 nothing valuable to its elucidation, their assumption is 

 nothing but vanity and vexation of spirit. For what 

 started the whole cognitive process was just the felt un- 

 satisfactoriness of our immediate experience : our inferences 

 must approve themselves as specifics against this disease, 

 by their ability to supplement the actual, by the power 

 they give us to transform our experiences. The trans 

 mutation of appearances therefore must not be represented 

 as an inscrutable privilege of the Absolute ; it must be 

 made a weapon mortal hands can actually wield. This 

 in fact is what we are continually doing ; it is the whole 

 aim of our conceptual manipulation of experience. If to 

 think it left reality the same, we should not waste 

 our lives upon what is to most a painful and irksome 

 business ; but in point of fact our thought ministers to 

 our perceptions and so alleviates the burden of life. The 

 results of our past thought enter into and transform our 

 immediate perceptions and render them more adequate as 

 guides to action. And this is what we want our thought 

 to do and why we value it. Intellectualist prejudice 

 indeed has interpreted this process into an excuse for 

 analysing perception into thought ; it is better regarded 

 as a proof of the practical value of thought and of the 

 teleological character of conception. 



What will in the last resort decide, therefore, whether 

 an inferred reality really exists or is merely a figment of 

 the imagination, is the way it works, and the power which 

 its aid confers. The assumption, e.g., of the earth s 

 rotundity is true, and preferable to the flat-earth theory, 

 because on the whole it works better and accounts better for 

 the course of our experience. Similarly, if I am comparing 

 the merits of the scientific theory that the transmission of 

 light is effected by the vibrations of a hypothetical reality 

 called the ether with those of a more poetic theory that 



