136 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



try to show here, and more fully in the next chapter the 

 modern movement is directed to a truer synthesis of 

 thought and experience, it is far as yet from attaining its 

 goal. It still works under constraint, dominated largely 

 by the instruments which it has itself created, because it 

 is not fully conscious of the how and the why of its own 

 action. 



The concept arises, as we have said, as a precipitate of 

 experience. Experience comes to us as a continuous and 

 concrete whole. If we are to do anything with it beyond 

 passively receiving it, we must in our thought break up 

 the perceptual order. In so doing we are guided partly 

 by the physical continuity and discontinuity of things 

 which divide the world of perception into distinguishable 

 objects, partly by likeness and unlikeness of character 

 which enable us to name the objects, their attributes, 

 relations and modes of behaviour. Both these functions 

 involve a certain grouping and re-grouping of the ele- 

 ments yielded by the perceptual order, and the basis of this 

 re-grouping is an analysis which distinguishes elements 

 and enables us to deal with them apart from the whole in 

 which they appear. Now as long as the concept retains 

 its living function of co-ordinating experience the separa- 

 tion is not misunderstood. But in proportion as it be- 

 comes an object of interest on its own account, and is 

 separated from the experience out of which it arises, and 

 from the world continuous with experience to which it 

 refers, two tendencies are set up. In the first place, the 

 concept is taken as real, or at lowest as the criterion of 

 reality. However uncritically formed it becomes a mould 

 into which our thought runs and outside of which we fail 

 to think clearly at all. Hence all experience that will not 

 fell within its four corners is dismissed as illusory, and as 

 the concept has been uncritically formed, and is further 

 liable to distortion in the very process of becoming inde- 

 pendent, such discrepancy goes far and deep. The result 

 is that experience is treated as a mere world of appearance 

 while reality is identified with the world of ideas. 



Thus the relation of thought and experience is inverted. 

 But this is not all. The concept itself undergoes a devi- 



