x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 189 



While revealing profound and fundamental truths which 

 may as justly be termed true scientific discoveries as any 

 which physical science can boast, this teaching has its 

 limitations and its liabilities to error. Essentially a matter 

 of insight rather than of reasoning, its truths are partial 

 rather than complete, and where it seeks to cover the whole 

 field of knowledge and action it does so rather by deduc- 

 tion from conceived positions than by the patient recon- 

 struction of reality through the piecemeal interpretation of 

 experience. In the support of its central position, which 

 rapidly becomes crystallised in dogmas, it postulates Faith, 

 and Faith comes to replace Love as the keystone of the 

 arch, and so to distort the whole ethical edifice. Moreover, 

 its appreciation of spiritual truth, being obtained rather by 

 penetrating insight into certain aspects than by the resolute 

 effort of reason to grasp the whole, is partial and one-sided. 

 In particular, in insisting on self-surrender it is apt to 

 ignore the claims of self-development, and in dwelling on 

 Love to pay less attention to justice. In holding before 

 the individual the way to obtain peace with his own soul it 

 has less regard for the collective life of humanity, and has 

 little concern for the possibilities of true social progress 

 upon earth. It tends to foster rather than to overcome the 

 antithesis between the world of the flesh and the world of 

 the spirit, and while confident that the one world only is 

 true and real, has practically to abandon the attempt to 

 incorporate the other within it. In the result it either 

 acquiesces in the division of the spiritual and temporal 

 power, or to maintain the form of supremacy explains away 

 its own fundamental teaching. Its comparative failure in 

 practice is therefore not to be attributed solely to the hard- 

 ness of heart of the sons of men, but equally to its inherent 

 limitations. 



(4) Realism. 



These limitations point to the need for a more funda- 

 mental reconstruction. The world of ethical thought and 

 practice, the fabric of social institutions in which thought 

 and practice are crystallised, has to be treated as the world 

 of knowledge is treated. It has to be dug out to its foun- 



