viii CONCEPTUAL RECONSTRUCTION 145 



ascertain the precise nature and conditions of this diver- 

 gence then becomes a purely empirical problem, but to 

 state it squarely is to recognise that the character of each 

 and every part is modified by the whole to which it belongs. 

 The analytic view which resolves behaviour into its ulti- 

 mate elements has then to be corrected by the synthetic 

 view which accounts for each element by its place in the 

 whole. The peculiarity of the organic character lies not in 

 one specific part but just in its wholeness. 



5. At the present time there is no danger that the errors 

 incident to abstract thinking will be overlooked. On the 

 contrary, all the tendency is in the opposite direction, and 

 insistence on the rights of instinct, feeling, emotion, and 

 the concrete practical interest is pushed to the point of 

 considerable scepticism as to the scope of articulate 

 thought. The tendency in the hands of thinkers must be 

 suicidal, for thought is nothing if it abandons the attempt 

 to be distinct, connected and articulate. It may, indeed, 

 be questioned whether all modes of reality can be articu- 

 lately rendered. Those who maintain the negative, 

 whether on the ground of some inherent irrationality of 

 things or of the limitations of thought, prepare for them- 

 selves serious metaphysical difficulties. But it is probable 

 that the current tendency is based on the failure of analysis 

 in certain specific instances, for example, in the analysis of 

 beauty, in the reduction of life to mechanical elements, 

 in the explanation of the religious sentiment in terms of 

 experience. In face of any such failure, two opposed 

 fallacies regularly find adherence. One party maintains 

 the sufficiency of the existing analysis. Another, con- 

 vinced of its inadequacy, insists on the discrepancy between 

 the living reality and the deadness of abstract thought, 

 and exaggerates it into a chasm that never will and never 

 can be passed. The element of mystery, the dim halo of 

 the uncertain and inarticulate, the obscure and the primal, 

 is for this way of thinking just the one thing that matters. 

 The attempt to explain, nay, even the attempt to state a 

 meaning in frank and unambiguous terms is resented as a 

 violation of the sanctuary. Thus popular thought wavers 



