148 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



the mother-sense, that is to say, it has grown up in response 

 to requirements of the environment, but how it is to be 

 interpreted in detail, is unfortunately not to be judged by 

 the simple deliverances of consciousness in which it 

 issues. That experience is narrow and incomplete is not 

 a reason for ignoring it altogether, but rather for seeking 

 means of extending it. That analysis is imperfect and 

 may be fallaciously used are not reasons for reverting to 

 uncritical dogmatism, but for supplying that which exist- 

 ing methods lack and correcting what in them is amiss. 

 We shall come in the next chapter to the methods in course 

 of elaboration in modern thought with these objects in 

 view. We may here briefly sum up the results of our 

 examination of the stage of conceptual reconstruction. 



The first stage of philosophic and scientific thought may 

 be considered as the internal development of the concep- 

 tual order. In some directions, notably in mathematics, 

 and wherever the combination or resolution of concepts 

 gives rise to new concepts without surreptitious modifica- 

 tion of data, a considerable advance can be made on this 

 method with very slender reference to experience. But 

 the process as a whole is liable to fallacies arising from 

 the conditions under which concepts are formed. They 

 are derived from a limited experience, by an analysis of 

 very variable adequacy, and unless critically used they 

 tend to a misleading rigidity which distorts the truth. 

 They are falsely used if treated as tests of reality, or as 

 self-existent, or as containing their evidence in themselves, 

 and this usage is the basis of the separation between the 

 world of thought and that of sense, or between Reality 

 and Appearance. Their uncritical employment, again, 

 engenders a certain materialism when use is made of the 

 most clearly definable conceptions as the measure of 

 things, and by reaction from the method, to mysticism 

 when the unanalysable elements of experience are endowed 

 with a special sanctity and divorced from the conceptual 

 order ; to Dogmatism when that which is at best but 

 obscurely felt is treated as though it were explicitly known, 

 and to a dogmatism of negation when the partial character 

 of analysis and of experience itself is ignored. While the 



