viii CONCEPTUAL RECONSTRUCTION 147 



entire attitude of men to life and the world, an attitude 

 which is, in fact, the expression of their total heredity and 

 their total experience likely therefore, one may say, to be 

 of all things the last to receive satisfactory shape in explicit 

 thought, and yet incapable of taking distinct shape and 

 performing its functions effectively except through the 

 medium of explicit thought. In such a case as this, we 

 might, indeed, seem in sorry plight, compelled to choose 

 between inadequate formulae or an ineffectual vagueness, 

 were it not that thought is not fixed but plastic, that it 

 corrects its own errors, and if allowed freedom of move- 

 ment, shapes itself stage by stage to the requirements of 

 the reality which it seeks to interpret. Throughout the 

 process of growth, both the parties to whom we have 

 referred will have a measure of truth on their side. On 

 the one side, articulate statement is necessary, if thought 

 is to advance at all, and it is only when certain elements 

 of experience are made explicit that we can begin to see 

 how much remains. On the other side, the adequacy of 

 any given analysis is justly subject to searching criticism, 

 and the c mother-sense ' has a right to express and to main- 

 tain any dissatisfaction which it feels. But both sides 

 have also certain natural tendencies to fallacy. Analysis 

 takes the part for the whole, or forces complex and subtle 

 experiences into the harder and simpler categories with 

 which it is more familiar. Feeling, on the other hand-, 

 sometimes opposes analysis altogether, and at others solidi- 

 fies itself into some explicit dogma or doctrine, the proof 

 of which would really lie and could lie only in the province 

 of thought. This is the most fruitful of all sources of 

 confusion. The real force behind a dogma is a mass of 

 feeling that has never been analysed, never left its home 

 in the mother-sense. But this feeling is not so strong 

 as to be happy without the appearance of evidence and 

 reasoning. It spins such evidence and reasoning, accord- 

 ingly, out of the first materials that come to hand, and 

 invests the flimsy web with its own intensity of emotion. 

 The only element of assured truth in the whole matter, 

 as analysis disentangles it, is the feeling in the background. 

 This feeling is so far entitled to respect that it belongs to 



