ix EXPERIENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION 161 



contributes. But this phrase is easily misunderstood. It 

 does not properly mean that the work of thought is to 

 construct relations which would not otherwise exist. For 

 the function of thought as a correlating activity is to dis- 

 cover what is already real, and the only thing it constructs 

 is its own system, which it means to correspond to the real 

 order. The proper meaning of the phrase is that thought 

 does not find all the relations that it needs given in experi- 

 ence ready to hand, but is an impulse to find relations which 

 exist but are not given, and to discover a complete con- 

 nectedness where only a partial order is observable. The 

 Logic of Experience seeks to lay down the principles and 

 conditions upon which this process of correlation is valid. 



Of this logic we shall have something to say in the next 

 part. Here we note the terms in which the problem is 

 stated as a characteristic product of modern thought. We 

 may usefully contrast the question, * What are the relations 

 between this and that datum ? ' with the * What is it ? ' 

 which is the characteristic formula of antiquity for the 

 scientific enquiry into a subject. The older form of 

 enquiry tacitly assumes that there is some typical concep- 

 tion under which the subject can be brought, and which 

 when fully set out will contain the explanation of any of 

 its properties. The thought of antiquity, that is to say, is 

 guided mainly by the impulse to reach certain central con- 

 ceptions, capable of being stated as definitions from which 

 a number of properties may be deduced. The order of 

 nature, including man and society within it, is seen as an 

 array of types to which actual things approximate. Science 

 is the knowledge of the central essence of the type, and of 

 the properties derived therefrom. So far as actual things 

 diverge from the type it is because they contain elements 

 of ambiguity and indefiniteness which remove them from 

 the purview of science proper, for science deals only with 

 the necessary and the universal. This is not necessarily a 

 static view of nature, for, as in the system of Aristotle, the 

 types might form an ascending series, and the world might 

 be conceived as a process in which the higher types are 

 realised in succession. But it is a view which places the 

 typical, the complete, the definite as it were on an eminence, 



