I 4 o DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



consider, lastly, how it distorts our rendering of experience 

 itself by transforming the fluid and continuous into a series 

 of crystallised terms divided by the void. This particular 

 trouble connects itself especially with the function of 

 analysis. To understand the given we analyse, and the 

 more we can analyse it down to distinct elements, and in 

 particular, the more we can get hold of elements that are 

 qualitatively alike, or are at least comparable, the more we 

 can render the world in conceptual terms. We can bring 

 in mathematics and substitute calculation for verification. 

 In all this we are apt to forget that all analysis lays us open 

 to the fallacies of partiality and incompleteness. We can 

 truly say of a concrete whole that it has a certain character, 

 although that character by no means exhausts its nature. 

 The predication becomes untrue only when we overlook 

 its partial character. The summer sky is blue. It is 

 absurd to criticise the predicate as false because the blue 

 is of a particular shade and of a certain degree of lumino- 

 sity. But the judgment does in practice become false, and 

 is, in fact, a fertile source of fallacy as soon as these qualify- 

 ing circumstances are forgotten. Thus the artist who 

 literally renders the colour that he sees, and in whose work 

 it is perhaps impossible to detect a flaw to which a name 

 can be given, may, nevertheless, produce a spiritless copy 

 out of which all the beauty has departed. What is this 

 spirit? Often in the world of beauty, perhaps always 

 in the present state of our criticism it is something which 

 defies, or has hitherto defied analysis. It is that which is 

 left over when all the characters that we have been able 

 to distinguish and to name are accounted for. Now there 

 are some who hold that this incompleteness of analysis is 

 inherent in our thought. So far as analysis can go, they 

 say there may be science and calculation. But reality, or 

 at any rate most important parts of reality, such as Life 

 and Consciousness and Beauty, are in their inmost essence 

 unanalysable, and therefore there will never be a science 

 of them. I do not think that we should be hasty either 

 in limiting the powers of analysis or in restricting science 

 to its sphere. But let us agree so far that the fallacy of 

 incomplete analysis is a fruitful source of disorder. Let 



