292 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 



thought about experience; and for progress and 

 for variety against the eternal fixed monotony of 

 the concept. But what says the rationalist? 

 What value has experience, he inquires, if it is sim 

 ply a chaos of disintegrated and floating debris? 

 What is the worth of personality and individuality 

 when they are reduced to crudity of brute feeling 

 and sheer intensity of impulsive reaction? What 

 is there left in progress that we should desire it, 

 when it has become a mere unregulated flux of 

 transitory sensations, coming and going without 

 reasonable motivation or rational purpose? 



Thus the intellectualist has endeavored to frame 

 / the structure of knowledge as a well-ordered econ 

 omy, where reason is sovereign, where the perma 

 nent is the standard of reference for the changing, 

 and where the individual may always escape from 

 his own mere individuality and find support and 

 reinforcement in a system of relations that lies 

 outside of and yet gives validity to his own passing 

 states of consciousness. Thus the rationalists hold 

 that we must find in a universal intelligence a 

 source of truth and guarantee of value that is 

 sought in vain in the confused and flowing mass 

 of sensations. 



The rationalist, in making the concept or gen 

 eral idea the all-important thing in knowledge, be 

 lieves himself to be asserting the interests of order 

 as against destructive caprice and the license of 



