vi THE EMPIRICAL ORDER 93 



again from the ordered world into the darkness of the 

 inane. The victory of the categories is not established 

 without a struggle, and like other victories it ends in a 

 dictatorship under which death or exile is the penalty of 

 recalcitrance. 



The empirical order thus established on the solid founda- 

 tion of the categories constitutes what we know as the 

 world of common sense. The term empirical must not 

 be taken to mean that the order consists simply of the 

 series of sensations, emotions, or, generally, of the contents 

 of immediate consciousness. Precisely because it is an 

 order it is more, and also less, than these. It is the world 

 built up out of these by unreflective processes of thought, 

 imagination, feeling, action. It is the world of which men 

 can give some account to themselves and one another. 

 There is in it something of system, for the general ideas 

 which it forms and employs serve to connect experiences 

 and to direct actions. But it is an unsystematic system, 

 for the principles of connection are never sought out beyond 

 the point to which practical needs or casual interest may 

 point, while the processes involved in establishing the 

 order, though processes of thought are, as has been said, 

 unreflective processes, that is to say their nature and impli- 

 cations are not examined. Nevertheless, though its con- 

 ceptions are loose, its generalisations somewhat slippery 

 and its methods uncritical, common sense does by slow 

 degrees evolve a kind of order. We may even say that 

 without deserting its own plane it evolves a generalised 

 conception of order the natural course of things Nature, 

 human, non-human, animate and inanimate as we know it 

 in experience, and this order in fact governs our ordinary 

 workaday life. It is this conception of nature and the 

 loosely woven tissue of rules, ideas, views and practices 

 that range themselves below it that I speak of here as the 

 Empirical Order. 



(2) The formation of this Empirical Order forms the 

 first phase in the development of human thought. Its 

 critical reconstruction occupies the second phase the two 

 corresponding to the two highest phases in the general 

 evolution of mind sketched in the last chapter. But both 



