246 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



we learn that he is the near relation of someone we already 

 know. It is equally possible that we might have been 

 struck by the character and so been led to enquire into the 

 relationship. Our point, however, is simply, that whatever 

 its genesis, the distinct element in the content is the basis 

 of the relations which we discover between different con- 

 tents. The element which, whether with the aid of much 

 or little or no analysis, whether by much or little abstraction 

 of surroundings, is rendered clear and distinct, is the unit 

 of correlating thought, the basis of the relations which 

 interconnect all elements in the world of experience. Thus, 

 to be clearly conscious of anything is to be in a position 

 to correlate it, to appreciate its relations with any other 

 thing. 



Now the impulse to such interconnection is another 

 name for the rational impulse itself. The rationally 

 grounded belief is a belief which is at least seen in con- 

 nection with others, as issuing from or justified by them. 

 This is the ground of its opposition to the irrational belief, 

 which is so called either because it contradicts others which 

 we still hold, or because it stands alone as an arbitrary 

 dogma which we choose to lay down and do not trouble 

 to prove. But to connect one element of experience with 

 another, we must first distinctly apprehend the elements 

 themselves. The analysed element is the unit of the 

 connected or rational system. And unless analysis is to be 

 an infinite process the ultimate units must be not further 

 analysable. That there should be a limit to analysis then 

 can be no bar to rational reconstruction. It is when we 

 take an imperfect analysis for an exhaustive statement that 

 fallacies arise, and it is probable that the attack on rational 

 method confuses the defective analyses of our actual think- 

 ing with the limits that there may be to analysis in the 

 nature of things, and so imputes the fallacies into which we 

 may be betrayed by reasoning from insufficient data to in- 

 herent defects of the rational method itself. There is always 

 more in our minds than is brought clearly before conscious- 

 ness, for, as we have seen, racial experience is acting within 

 the individual mind from the earliest stage, but acting 

 massively so as to produce certain broad resultant effects, 



