238 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



understandings, these would be due not to some inherent 

 defect in thought but to an incompleteness which further 

 efforts might remove. The inference would be not that 

 our knowledge is confined to a world of appearance from 

 which it can never escape, but that it is a knowledge of 

 reality obscured and confused in some degree by limits 

 which it is constantly seeking and often successfully seeking 

 to overstep. 



But it is said the contradictions involved in the empirical 

 order are more vital than these. They affect, according 

 to some accounts, the very form of our assertions, and are 

 therefore ineradicable, since in correcting them we make 

 assertions of the same form. The simplest judgment, for 

 example, is said to involve contradictions, and the cate- 

 gories of causality, substance and personality are in the 

 same predicament. These allegations may, I believe, be 

 dispelled by a more adequate criticism of categories. As 

 has been briefly hinted above, when categories like those 

 of identity, of cause or of substance are referred back to 

 the experience out of which they arise and which it is their 

 function to express, the contradictions which appear to 

 beset them in their abstract form disappear. The contra- 

 dictions supposed to be inherent in thought arise from that 

 ossification which besets thought detached from experience. 

 They belong, not to thought as such, but to a stage of 

 thought, and are overcome by experiential reconstruction. 

 I will not here add anything to the remarks made above 

 (Part I. Ch. VIII.), as the principle of reconstruction will 

 appear sufficiently from the instances given there, and I 

 have discussed many of the chief problems with some 

 fullness on another occasion (Theory of 'Knowledge r , Pt. L 

 Gh. XII.). But a word must be added on the special diffi- 

 culties that centre upon the idea of infinity. As to this 

 difficulty we must discriminate. In the bare idea of a 

 space, a time, or a causal process extending without limits 

 there is no contradiction. Contradiction arises, if it arises 

 at all, only when the world of space, time and causation is 

 conceived as a complete system. Now we shall see pre- 

 sently that there is a sense in which the conception of the 

 world as a system is involved in the general postulates of 



