86 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



and, in spite of what has just been said, it might seem 

 that on the lines just indicated it could advance inde- 

 finitely towards a comprehensive view of experience 

 and even of reality as a whole. But in point of fact 

 the work of thought in the stage hitherto considered is 

 broken and incomplete. Experience is gathered up into 

 masses presenting some internal order, but not yet har- 

 monised one with another. Our common knowledge is 

 broken knowledge and half knowledge, a series of glimpses 

 with no complete vision. In close correspondence our 

 purposes are fragmentary and inconsistent, and we war both 

 with ourselves and with one another. The roots of this 

 discord can be traced to the conditions of development, 

 and in following the movement of human thought we shall 

 see how inevitably they result from the uncritical reactions 

 of the social mind-structure to the promptings of its 

 experience. Conversely, the method of advance towards 

 genuine unity lies alike on the side of knowledge and of 

 action through a process of reconstruction. This recon- 

 struction, the general character of which will be discussed 

 in Chapters VIII. and IX., will be found to depend, once 

 again, on a fresh turn of the mind by which that which 

 has hitherto operated on consciousness becomes a content in 

 consciousness. In this case the factor in question is nothing 

 less than the correlating activity itself, the structure of the 

 mind, the entirety of the data and the processes by which 

 and out of which the mind evolves its percepts, its thoughts 

 and its purposes. The nature, the growth, the poten- 

 tialities of mind itself form the keystone of the complete 

 synthesis at which reconstruction aims. 



And as at former stages so here, the new turn of thought 

 brings us into contact with a deeper stratum of reality. 

 As we passed from a 'world' of sensory stimulus and 

 feeling to one of related objects and events, and from the 

 network of percepts to the elements of common character 

 and persistent identity running through it, so now in 

 the critical reconstruction of knowledge we are dealing 

 throughout with a new view of reality the underlying 

 forces, be they spiritual or mechanical, which are grasped 

 indeed by means of perception and thought, but only when 



