vii THE TWO ORDERS 115 



civilisation. We have the development of Brahmanism in 

 India, the beginnings of ethical monotheism in Hebrew 

 prophecy, the mysticism, and close upon it the ethical 

 idealism of China, and finally the philosophic movement 

 in Greece. What measure of interconnection we are to 

 postulate among these movements, how far we are to 

 suppose a direct propagation of ideas, or at least of stimulus 

 by unknown contacts, how much is due to independent 

 development, it is not yet possible to say. But during that 

 period the foundations of our own thought and religion 

 were laid. The thinkers of that time still speak to us. 

 The questions they raised are still our questions. Of the 

 creeds, systems, and methods of thought which have since 

 dominated civilisation, Brahmanism, Buddhism, the Con- 

 fucian ethics and Greek philosophy and science were born 

 within that period, while Christianity and Islam were engen- 

 dered later, out of the influences which then came to birth. 

 This, then, is the foundation period of the Reconstruction. 



(4) It is not within our purpose to follow the movement 

 historically, but to distinguish its leading phases, noting 

 only those points which have special significance for the 

 general development of Mind. We must deal first with 

 the work of the religious impulses, which in their dissatis- 

 faction with the empirical order, urge the Mind on to the 

 creation of a world of its own. 



For it is the irony of human thought that experience 

 itself forces on man problems which it cannot solve, and 

 yet successively destroys all solutions which rest on any 

 authority but its own. Not that religion is wholly 

 divorced from experience. There are at the core of religi- 

 ous psychology elements of genuine experience, which as 

 experience is just as real as the sensations of heat and 

 cold. There is a true spiritual insight, that is to say, an 

 apprehension of the workings of the psychical, a sense of 

 those deeper realities on which our personal life and our 

 relations to others rest. Such insight is for most men 

 fitful, and reached only through some experience heavily 

 charged with emotion. It may come in the romance of 

 love or through the equally passionate and less selfish 



