58 The Concept of Method 



that state of spirit which we ordinarily designate by the term 

 " worship." The actual character of the content of experience has, 

 within certain limits, little methodological significance. Nor can 

 we say that this threefold sequence of stages corresponds to that 

 of infancy, youth, and maturity, since savages never get beyond 

 the first stage and a very large number of civilised and mature 

 individuals are content to rest in the second. 



Since, therefore, this threefold character of the experience of 

 any individual cannot be explained by an examination of the par- 

 ticular content of this or that mind, nor by the widely varying ex- 

 periences of many persons, and since it cannot be regarded as 

 the necessary concomitant of advancing years, this triune char- 

 acter of experience must be regarded as inherent in the process 

 of experience itself. That is, the three stages of self-unconscious- 

 ness, self-consciousness, and self-realisation are modes of experi- 

 ence according to which each individual lives until each stage is 

 so developed in that individual that he unconsciously grows into 

 the next. There is no inherent necessity that an individual 

 should actually grow from the earliest to the latest stage, nor 

 is there anything in the nature of each stage to determine what 

 the character of the experience to which it refers shall be. The 

 only necessity that there is must be found, in the first place, in the 

 continuity of the process, which determines that, if an individual 

 develop his experience or his experience develop him, the de- 

 velopment must proceed from self-unconsciousness, through self- 

 consciousness to self-realisation, and in no other order. In the 

 second place, there is the necessity involved by the unity of the 

 process of experience which determines that the development 

 shall be that of one individual, and that here, at least, there can 

 be no element of vicariousness. If the experience of a person 

 is to be an organic unity, that individual cannot appropriate at 

 the level of self-consciousness the thoughts and beliefs and in- 

 terpretations of experience set forth by a man who has reached 

 the third stage wherein diverse elements are divested of their 

 opposition and are seen as the aspects of an ultimate unity. To 

 appropriate in this way the results of another's experience with- 

 out first having made them actual factors in his own is but to add 

 to the number of disparate un-unified particulars that must be 

 related before the third stage can be reached. 



