i02 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



or (what is more frequent) our dim sense may clothe itself 

 in a misleading shape of concrete definiteness, and we may 

 feel an intense conviction of luminous truth when all the 

 time the actual images that we possess are mere shadows, 

 and what is working within us is something far other than 

 that which we suppose. This leads us to the third and 

 lowest grade, where the unseen forces are also unthought 

 of, but where none the less they affect our thought, shape 

 our theories and guide our impulses. In this capacity they 

 are apt to intrude as disturbing influences on the world of 

 common sense, arresting its work of systematisation on its 

 own plane, by obtruding the element of the incalculable 

 and bringing in the emotions of fear and hope to distort the 

 cooler processes of inference and belief. 



In this form underlying reality is at work upon con- 

 sciousness from the first, and, as we have seen in the analysis 

 of magic and animism, Thought even before the empirical 

 order is formed is by no means content with the world that 

 it can see and touch. It has its view of the processes that 

 underlie the tangible and visible, and this view is in a 

 certain sense a theory of causation and a conception of the 

 supersensible. But in this connection we must be very 

 careful to hold different stages of development apart. 

 Neither magic nor animism is as yet in any strictness a 

 theory of the supersensible or supernatural, because as long 

 as they are dominant there is as yet no theory of the sensible 

 and natural. More than that there is not in strictness any 

 theory at all in the sense of a connected system of articulate 

 thoughts. There are beliefs, ceremonies, practices, which 

 we can reduce to principles and so form into a theory, but 

 if those who held them possessed the same powers of reflec- 

 tion they would cease to hold them. Nor are the spirits of 

 animism or the powers of magic supposed to be super- 

 natural. Some spirits have mysterious powers. But 

 spirits as such are just like ourselves, or they are the life 

 or the functions of things precipitated into an image 

 The troll and gnome and dwerg 

 And the gods of cliff and berg 

 Were about us and beneath us and above. 



There was not one order of this perceptual world and 



