vi THE EMPIRICAL ORDER 97 



tive thought a confusion of categories, not as meaning 

 that the categories having been formed are then con- 

 founded, but as meaning that they are not so far as these 

 constructions prevail adequately distinguished and firmly 

 established. Aspects of the empirical order which for 

 common sense are clearly distinct remained blended and 

 blurred so that we pass from one order of ideas to another 

 without any sense of discontinuity. No lines of demar- 

 cation are fixed. 



(b) But secondly, these confusions have behind them a 

 distinct driving force which accounts for their extravagant 

 development and persistence in certain directions. Common 

 sense, though not ruled by conscious logic, is moved by its 

 own determining forces in a broad sense along the lines 

 which logic afterwards formulates. That is to say, it is 

 guided by experience which it generalises with a certain 

 caution, correcting and limiting one rough generalisation 

 by another, and piecing the results of experience together 

 by a rude analysis and synthesis. In the court of common 

 sense, though there be no formulae, good evidence is 

 already distinguished from bad, and good evidence consists 

 either in reasoning from admitted data or in some fact or 

 facts of perception to which one can point. Now to have 

 come thus far in the course of rationalisation is to have 

 advanced a stage in human thought, for we find below it a 

 stage marked with tolerable clearness in which it is neither 

 perception of relevant facts nor dispassionate reasoning 

 from admitted data, but partly the drift of fancy and much 

 more the sway of impulse-feeling which determines belief. 

 By the drift of fancy I mean the incalculable movements of 

 ideas in the imagination under the stress of chance associa- 

 tions, of the play of words and of other forces having no 

 relation to the real evidence for a belief. By the sway of 

 impulse-feeling I mean that in the lowest stages of the 

 human mind ideas, propounded by no matter what, tend to 

 be accepted if they suit our feelings, and to be rejected if 

 they annoy. Acceptance and rejection are the primary 

 attitudes out of which reluctant affirmation or denial are 

 developed by differentiation. Ideas arise, as we have seen, 

 in the practical sphere as the directive element in desire. 



