248 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



the area which it has actually and definitely reclaimed, and 

 the less it can refuse to acknowledge any value in the 

 obscurer and inexplicit promptings of forces that lie beyond 

 its ken. In these circumstances there are three royal roads 

 to fallacy. The first is to regard explicit analysed articulate 

 experience in its existing incompleteness as the sole and 

 sufficient measure of reality, and to dismiss the world of 

 poetry and art, of religious emotion and enthusiasm to a 

 limbo of beautiful imagination. The second is to despise 

 the articulate and abandon the effort to extend its sphere. 

 The third and commonest is to take as articulate truth that 

 which has its foundations essentially in the inarticulate. The 

 feelings which emerge into consciousness clothe themselves 

 in the form which they find at hand. They take up with the 

 body of traditional ideas that lie nearest to them and clothe 

 themselves therewith, not as with a garment but rather 

 as with something that becomes one with themselves. In 

 this process we have already seen the true psychological 

 energy that upholds dogma, and we have seen also that 

 the method of rational criticism is to separate out the feeling 

 from the form which it takes. The mass of impulse and 

 emotion, the body of needs, explicit or obscure, that make 

 up the religious feelings of man, have roots that run deep 

 in our nature. Whatever their source they are as feelings 

 real and vital. We must, at lowest, admit their existence 

 as facts and their importance as forces. We shall, if we 

 are guided by the conception of mental growth as compara- 

 tive psychology reveals it, go a step further. We shall 

 treat them as indications of a deeper phase of reality which 

 we are only beginning to understand. But we shall also, 

 on the same grounds, resolutely decline to accept as valid 

 the ideas with which they unite themselves. For the 

 explicit idea the logical ground is experience, shaped into 

 thought by processes which can be rendered explicit and 

 justified by rational tests of mutual coherence. Feeling, 

 as such, is no logical or self -consistent support for a belief, 

 and for the extension of our assured knowledge there 

 remains only the one method of the expansion and im- 

 proved correlation of our experience. This process will, 

 if the source of a feeling lies deep in the realities of our 



