ii SCIENTIFIC RECONSTRUCTION 265 



does not suggest but repudiates the possibility of error. The 

 value of the doubt, which throughout is grounded on experi- 

 ence, must then fall to zero, and we could speak of certainty. 



Of certainty, that is, if we assume the legitimacy of our 

 axiom. But on what does this axiom rest ? Not, I think, 

 on the fact that it actually gives results which harmonise, 

 though that is a necessary condition of its validity. If it 

 failed to give harmony it would be contradicted by its 

 results, and must be false. But though its results do not 

 contradict it, this only proves that it may be, not that it 

 must be, true. On what then is its certainty founded? 

 On this, I think. Every act of thought, at any rate every 

 act of inference, may be regarded as an implicit judgment 

 connecting premiss and conclusion. Every such judgment 

 is concrete, having to do with the specific facts before it, 

 but any such judgment has also a certain class character, 

 can be analysed into an abstract assertion. Find that asser- 

 tion and you have a generalisation which the mass of our 

 inferences support, which if true maintains, if untrue 

 destroys them. We can, in fact, prune off false elements 

 of inference by thus generalising and comparing them with 

 one another. Similarly we find true inferences corrobo- 

 rating one another in that they involve or lead up to a 

 single principle. The principle of reasoning then rests on 

 the multifold separate acts of reasoning, and expresses their 

 harmony with one another. 



We are thus led to the conception of knowledge not as 

 a body of thought guaranteed by its dependence on first 

 principles, which stand above all criticism, but as a body of 

 judgments, the strength of which lies in the fact that in the 

 main they support one another. This is the systematic 

 view of knowledge, and we may ask (a) whether it conforms 

 to the requirements of the conception of rational validity, 

 and (b) whether, if so, it throws any clear light on the value 

 of the thought that we possess regarded as an interpretation 

 of reality. 



7. Let us first ask what is meant by the term Rational, 

 and in doing so let us start afresh, without assuming any of 

 the points advanced in the preceding argument. 



