1 62 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



and is ill adapted for the systematic study of order in varia- 

 tion. It is, in fact, quite consonant with the conceptual 

 logic, and formulates the range of truth that can be studied 

 with a relatively slender experience and without constant 

 back-reference to experience. The modern problem 

 places the whole field of enquiry more on a level, its uni- 

 formities are sought through all the wilderness of variation 

 and change, and its types are rather sign-posts or meeting- 

 points or critical turnings in a continuous area than solitary 

 eminences parted by the void from one another. Its clue 

 is the discovery of an order of which all the terms are com- 

 parable inter se, with which our experience, with its rich 

 qualitative diversity, can be correlated. Thus our sensa- 

 tions of sound, light, colour, heat, our experiences of touch, 

 resistance, pressure, our perceptions of motion, rest and 

 bodily form can be correlated with the terms of a mechanical 

 system which thus carries the notion of a single order right 

 through the world of perception. Indeed, the success of 

 the mechanical principle in its own sphere tempts to a hasty 

 generalisation which would extend it to the whole of 

 reality, but a very little philosophical criticism is needed to 

 show the fallacy of baldly identifying the life of mind with 

 a process to which it stands related. The further effort of 

 modern thought then is to find a similar order for the world 

 of mind and of life in general, and for this purpose 

 though as yet the work is but beginning it has elaborated 

 the comparative method and the governing conception of 

 development. If the mechanical order was the culminating 

 conception of the first movement of modern thought, the 

 evolutionary order holds the same place in the second 

 period, and as the mechanical system provided the common 

 terms by means of which all the variety and change and 

 detail of physical experience could be brought into corre- 

 lation, so the idea of development enables the facts of 

 structure and function, of life, intelligence and purpose to 

 be seen in their mutual relations. Experience falls into 

 the two series, the mechanical and the developmental, or, as 

 I will venture provisionally to call it, the Teleological. 

 There will remain the final problem of interrelating the 

 two orders, a problem which can never be wholly solved 



