236 SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL 



including man, as both sure and universal. Not that this 

 conviction of universal order is justified by our actual 

 knowledge. Our knowledge of the connections of things 

 breaks off short on every hand : we do not know what 

 binds together the common qualities of common objects, 

 or what, in a thousand instances, links antecedent to conse- 

 quent. The existence of law is, in all such cases, an 

 unverified hypothesis, and the conception of the world as 

 a cosmic whole is an ideal after which we reach rather than 

 our actual possession. But, on the other hand, this ideal 

 is something more than a guess : it is a postulate of 

 thought, without which thinking would not take place. 

 Once convinced that the world is not a cosmos but a chaos, 

 that there is no connection between events, that any ante- 

 cedent may be followed by any consequent, thought would 

 be both impossible and idle. All the processes that give 

 unity to our experience and make our life rational rest upon 

 and are inspired by the belief that the world is one and 

 rational, an intelligible whole in which every phenomenon 

 has its own place. And the evolution of our rational life, 

 together with every fresh insight into the nature of reality, 

 is simply a progressive ratification of this faith of reason 

 in the outer order of the world ; it is a partial realization 

 of the ideal of knowledge in the crudest intellectual 

 endeavour, and the ideal is only very imperfectly achieved 

 and actualized in the most mature. 



Now, it can be shown that the conception of the moral 

 cosmos, the conception that every particular good has its 

 own place and meaning in a scheme of universal good, 

 constitutes in a similar way the beginning and the end of 

 our practical moral life. This is the parallel hypothesis 

 which the gradual growth of individual character and of 



