106 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



and calculation is at bottom a putting together, a piecing 

 and re-piecing of the thought-elements so provided. 

 Lastly, within the world of common sense and before we 

 reach science, the process of inference is at least so far 

 explicit that the distinction of grounded truth on the one 

 hand, and fallacy, fancy, and make-believe upon the other, 

 is fully apparent. It is here in particular that common 

 sense represents an advance on the modes of thought 

 typified by primitive magic, and offers a point of possible 

 resistance to the dreamier world of mysticism and even of 

 religion in general. 



Now this common-sense method with its dawning 

 science of calculation gives men a certain power of dealing 

 with their environment. But it does not meet the funda- 

 mental problems of life. It gives men neither practical 

 aid nor mental peace in face of the issues of death, of dis- 

 grace, of the deeper moral difficulties, the more searching 

 problems of social life. The reason of its failure has been 

 set forth already. It is that though it moves with some 

 sureness within its own area, its area is, relatively speaking, 

 the surface of life, and there are depths below the surface 

 in which the springs of life lie hid. We have seen how 

 from these springs arise the impulses and sentiments that 

 get themselves clothed with ideas and embodied in tradi- 

 tions. As long as common sense is itself only struggling 

 for existence, tradition passes unquestioned, and the gods 

 survive. But as soon as the empirical method gains the 

 confidence that comes from success on its own lines, a new 

 position is reached. The adult mind will make a corre- 

 sponding demand on the religious tradition. Men will by 

 no means be contented to leave fundamentals alone, but 

 in dealing with them they will require a certain logic, a 

 certain coherence, a certain account of the relations between 

 the proposed solution and the empirical order in which, 

 so far as it goes, they have come to place deserved confi- 

 dence. In short, as there has arisen a natural or practical 

 order so there must now be a reasoned religious order 

 a coherent theory of final problems, and between the two 

 orders there must be an intelligible relation. These re- 

 quirements set the problem to the higher religions and the 



