v INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE 81 



I may not think about the basis of the matter. I may be 

 concerned merely with the present and I put off my walk. 

 But if a discussion ensues I begin to analyse, I point to 

 those clouds, remark on the heat, consider the direction of 

 the wind and (to take the matter in a very simple form) 

 point to the correspondence in all these details with the 

 situation of yesterday. This is to dissect the situation as 

 perception gives it me, to find elements common to it and 

 to a previous situation, and to make these common elements 

 an explicit ground of inferring a further point of resem- 

 blance. There are here the essentials of the reasoning 

 process, the bare elements of which may be succinctly 

 characterised. The data of perception are resolved into 

 distinct elements of character recognised as qualifying 

 experience (analysis), and such elements can be combined 

 to form new wholes without any reference to the order in 

 which they are perceived (synthesis). 1 Hence are formed 

 thought constructions or concepts which take us altogether 

 beyond the world of perception. Whither they take us, 

 whether to a region of pure imagination or to a deeper 

 reality than that of perceptual experience depends on the 

 way in which they are formed. In this process the struc- 

 ture of the mind as shaped indirectly by racial and more 

 directly by personal experience is necessarily the determin- 

 ing force, but at the outset it operates unconsciously. 

 Inasmuch as it has been formed under the conditions 

 governing survival, it tends in the main so to construct our 

 thought-world as to facilitate and improve our dealings 

 with reality. But this is only to secure a very rough and 

 general correspondence, and how far thought actually yields 

 truth remains a question, which is only to be solved by 

 bringing its data, methods and results into conscious corre- 

 lation. This is the work of a higher phase of development 

 of which we shall speak presently. Meanwhile we must note 

 certain points bearing on the evolution of the thought-world. 



1 It should be understood that analysis and synthesis are not two 

 separate processes, but rather distinguishable phases of what is essentially 

 a single process of correlation. Where one is explicit the other will be 

 found to be implied. Thus, what is consciously a comparison, and so a 

 synthesis of two objects, rests, on an analysis, and conversely. 



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