vii THE TWO ORDERS 113 



yield us no truth then we possess none. Nevertheless 

 experience as extended by observation and experiment, 

 as refined and remodelled by analytical and comparative 

 methods, undergoes a reconstruction which it is logically 

 possible to take as genuine knowledge of reality, while 

 recognising a narrower experience and a cruder thought- 

 order as an imperfect and even misleading interpretation 

 of the Real. There are here assumptions as to the final 

 validity of thought which require justification, and the 

 lines of this justification will be summarily indicated at a 

 later stage. Our first task will be to follow out the pro- 

 cess of reconstruction itself in its principal steps. 



(3) Viewed very broadly, the work of reconstruction 

 may be said to fall into two main phases. In the earlier, 

 the mind works with the ideas that it has educed from 

 experience. By meditation, by analysis, by interrelation, it 

 seeks to transform them from loose generalities into exact 

 concepts, to elaborate a systematic order, to achieve in- 

 ternal consistency. It feels that truth is one and consistent 

 in all its parts, and if it could arrive at a wholly consistent 

 body of thought, it would be confident that it had attained 

 truth. It thus effects a Conceptual Reconstruction, yield- 

 ing a view of Reality which differs widely from that of 

 common sense. It does not necessarily neglect experience, 

 but in truth, until the conceptual order is well developed, 

 it lacks the necessary instrument for advancing the investi- 

 gation of experience materially beyond the point which 

 common sense has already reached. The first phase 

 then is preparatory to a second in which the critical 

 investigation of experience itself is the dominant factor, 

 in which the foundations of the older conceptual order 

 are dug out and laid anew, and a more fundamental 

 reconstruction is begun. Of these two phases, the earlier 

 was the special work of the ancient, the latter of modern 

 thought. But we are not to infer that the work of 

 antiquity was done once for all, and that the modern had 

 simply to begin where the ancients left off. On the con- 

 trary, the problems raised in the early stages of reflection 

 are still unsolved, and only open deeper issues as they are 



