CHAP, ix EXPERIENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION 151 



still flourished, and the advance of Mathematics in par- 

 ticular continued until the social decay of the fourth century 

 arrested intellectual development in the West. 



While Europe slumbered and slept, the Arabic schools, 

 under an impulse derived partly from India, partly from 

 the debris of the classical culture, carried on the develop- 

 ment of Algebra into a distinct branch of mathematical 

 discipline, and by their chemical investigations gave new 

 scope to experimentation. The contact with Oriental 

 culture brought about the tardy revival of learning in the 

 West, which, after spending three centuries in the assimila- 

 tion of Greek thought, set forth on lines of its own. 

 Nothing is more difficult than to state in any general terms 

 the distinguishing features of modern philosophy, and 

 nothing more false than the denial that it possesses such 

 features. All the problems of thought and being men- 

 tioned above are problems for the modern as for the ancient, 

 but the modern has, after all, carried these problems 

 further back. It is doubtless easy to recognise in many 

 attempted explanations by modern thinkers, errors and dis- 

 tortions which are avoided by Plato or Aristotle. Such 

 things always occur when an earlier thinker of the first 

 quality is stating relations or describing processes which 

 a later one is striving to resolve into something more 

 elementary. Yet it is rarely, if ever, true that the solution 

 of a modern problem is to be found in an ancient thinker, 

 though it is not seldom the case that we may profitably 

 revert from the partial explanation to which some moderns 

 have been led, to the more balanced and rounded expres- 

 sion of the facts to be explained as we may find them in 

 some Aristotelian definition. It is not to our purpose to 

 deal with successive syntheses of philosophy or the value 

 of the solutions which they have propounded of the pro- 

 blems of Reality. Our purpose is to note the emergence 

 of certain conceptions essential to the work of Recon- 

 struction, which we have seen to be the problem set to 

 thought by the conditions of its evolution. Now, the 

 leading conceptions required appear to be three. In the 

 first place, the Mind must appreciate its own position. 

 It must recognise and measure its own contribution to the 



