The Function of Method 87 



realised in our science and philosophy, and it indicates that in 

 every fact we state, in every thought we think, and in everything 

 which we believe, though not having seen, there is the continual 

 interaction between this standard of unity on the one hand, be 

 it expressed as truth, or beauty, or conviction, and the various 

 phenomena of our experience which we sift and mould and train 

 in various ways, even to remaking our personal world, in order 

 to bring it more into harmony with this ideal of unity, w'hich 

 alone gives permanence. 



(3) For, in the third place, were there universal permanence 

 in fact as well as in principle, there could be no experience, 

 which by its very nature implies an element that is not perma- 

 nent. It is out of this manifold of changing manifestations that 

 the method of human experience, through its functions of con- 

 trol, developes a unity. It realises the permanent despite the 

 fluctuating instaibility of its confines, much as we realise the 

 permanence of the ocean behind and beneath the ebb and flow 

 of tide and waves which unceasingly change its limits. It is 

 curious that this variability in phenomena, this multitude of ap- 

 parent particulars should have been regarded by some as the 

 strongest argument against the unity which philosophy postulates, 

 when in reality it is a necessary condition of our experience as 

 individuals and of the very possibility of our conception of unity 

 and permanence. It is not only in metaphysics that the prac- 

 tical opposition between the one and the many is a criterion of 

 the possibility of experience, but in psychology, where the whole 

 treatment of perception, association, and memory depends on this 

 element of disparity and change ; in logic, where the whole 

 process of deductive and inductive reasoning depends upon the re- 

 lationship of the one and the many ; and in theology, where, per- 

 haps more than in any other branch of thought, questions of unity 

 and plurality, and of the relation of the temporal and the indi- 

 vidual to the permanent and universal, have appeared fraught 

 with ultimate significance. 



To sum up, it appears that we cannot have any experience 

 without something fundamentally permanent as a basis ; nor can 

 we have experience without certain variations from this per- 

 manent, the disparity between which, when consciously realised in 

 our experiences, forces us by the very constitution of our thought 

 to make use of the permanent to control the transient and acci- 



