i EXPERIENCE AND REALITY 235 



ment of mind will then be seen as a movement which, after 

 traversing many phases, has arrived at a method of grasping 

 Reality and of directing its own life to ends of real value. 

 In that case the future of development will become a 

 question of the highest interest. There will exist some at 

 least of the conditions of a permanent advance, and it will 

 be necessary to ask what further conditions are required 

 and whether these conditions are realised. This will open 

 up questions of the general conditions of development, 

 and, ultimately, of the whole position of Mind in Reality. 

 Our first business then is to examine the validity of 

 that Experiential Reconstruction which we have taken as 

 the highest phase in the development of Mind. By a valid 

 process I mean one which, taken as a whole, yields know- 

 ledge of Reality. We have to ask then whether any 

 construction of experience can yield knowledge of Reality ? 

 May not Reality be not only unknown but unknowable? 

 Or may it be that critical reconstruction, properly inter- 

 preted, points rather to some higher way of thinking which 

 puts all ordinary experience in a new light and yields 

 certain fundamental truths which could never be attained 

 by any piecemeal combination of empirical data? Or 

 may it be, again, that it is not by thinking in the ordinary 

 sense but by some form of feeling, intuition or instinct 

 that we approach the deepest truths? All these are 

 questions on which opposite views are still held, views 

 which, if they do not prove the fallibility, at least indicate 

 the incompleteness and immaturity of experiential recon- 

 struction at the present stage of its development. 



2. Our theory itself emphasizes this incompleteness, but 

 it implies that, though of course experience does not give 

 us the whole of reality, what it does give us is reality as 

 far as it goes. There is no line of demarcation between 

 that which comes within the sphere of consciousness and 

 that which remains outside. The limits are such as those 

 of the eye and ear, and they are limits capable of being 

 transcended, and, in fact, constantly being transcended as 

 new methods of observation are invented and as new cate- 

 gories or principles emerge clearly into consciousness. 



