242 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



time as a whole. Such change of conception as these 

 metaphors represent might be necessitated by an attempt 

 to grasp the totality of things, while it would not vitiate 

 the inferences by which we had built up the partial order 

 of actual science. 



Now if we had to postulate the possibility of a com- 

 pleted system as the foundation of any inference, the im- 

 possibility of rendering it adequately in conception would 

 be fatal. But if such a system is an ideal to which we may 

 approach by repeated reconstructions of thought, no exist- 

 ing difficulty in representing it is an argument against the 

 claim of thought to yield a partial representation of reality. 

 More generally, if there could be no knowledge of reality 

 but that which is final and complete, there could be for us 

 none at all. The whole contention of the experiential 

 method is that knowledge is partial and approximative, and 

 that it advances by constant correction, not only of its 

 results but also of its methods and principles. We may 

 know the part without knowing the whole. We may know 

 it approximately without knowing it accurately. Our 

 interpretation of it may be good for the purpose of such 

 partial knowledge and yet liable to final revision in relation 

 to the whole. The methods by which we have arrived at 

 it may be sound methods of dealing with the part, though 

 inadequate to an understanding of the whole of things. 

 Fallacies and contradictions arise when the partial character 

 of knowledge is overlooked. But there is no contradiction 

 contained in experience as such or inherent in the method 

 of interpreting Reality by the correlation of experience. 



4. But, it may be contended, the difficulty admitted in 

 conceiving Reality as a whole has a deeper root. It is trace- 

 able to the inherent limitations of analysis. But analysis 

 is the condition of rational knowledge, and we must ask our- 

 selves accordingly whether rational knowledge is a tenable 

 ideal. The doctrine that the Real is rational was founded 

 on the presumption that mind is rational. But suppose 

 that mind and all that belongs to it, suppose that life itself 

 is something fundamentally irrational, moving none knows 

 whence or whither as the blasts of impulse carry it. To 



