xxviii INTRODUCTION 



for which unfortunately there is not sufficient space here. 

 In part it is due to the more concrete study of psychology 

 and the prominence which any science, particularly in its 

 more popular versions, is apt to give to newly opened 

 territory. In part again it arises from the extraordinary 

 discoveries of science itself, which have undoubtedly under- 

 mined many old categories, and seem to some to have made 

 almost anything possible. Another factor is the old desire 

 to be free of rational trammels, and create in imagination a 

 world which will satisfy the cravings of man a desire 

 which in these days fortifies itself with odds and ends from 

 the psychology of faith-healing. For if faith can remove 

 blisters, why should it not remove mountains? All this 

 reaction is of purely temporary significance. Rational pur- 

 pose is, and will always in the end be, recognised as the 

 distinctive feature of the activity of mind, and though it 

 may fairly enough be maintained that the mind is more than 

 its purposes, and that the purposes themselves grow and 

 take definite shape in the very process of execution, this is 

 only to contend that the mind, as we know it, is still 

 imperfectly aware of its self and its own meanings. It is to 

 set one problem the more to the student of the evolution of 

 self-consciousness. A mere vital impulse may blow like 

 the wind where it listeth, so that none can tell whence it 

 I cometh or whither it goeth. But creative or rather plastic 

 mind is that which moves towards ends which are worth 

 reaching, and because they are worth reaching. It gets a 

 better view of them as it advances, not so much because 

 they are nearer as because its own nature as mind is being 

 all along developed by its activity and its experience, and 

 this development means precisely that its purposes are 

 clearer, more harmonious and more comprehensive. 



To justify this view of mind it has to be shown that the 

 postulates of logical thought are intelligible and self- 



