272 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



time, but the principle of organising experience as a whole. 

 In proportion as this principle is carried further we reach, 

 not the truth, but a step on the way to truth fuller know- 

 ledge, deeper insight, more articulate expression. It is in 

 this sense that thought, as an interconnected system, is valid. 



Nothing has been said so far of the methods by which 

 judgments are formed, and interconnected. But it was 

 pointed out above that an act of interconnection, of infer- 

 ence, for example, is the expression of a felt mental necessity 

 which may be regarded logically as the equivalent of a 

 judgment stating that the conclusion of the inference 

 follows from the premiss. Inferences are very often faulty, 

 but when by analysis and comparison those which are 

 mutually inconsistent are separated out and those which 

 coincide and so necessitate each other are formed into a 

 general statement or law of thought, we have in such an 

 axiom the expression of the consilience of a body of judg- 

 ments (or their equivalents) habitually formed by the 

 human mind. These laws have further to be compared 

 with one another, and it has to be seen whether contradic- 

 tory results arise in applying them to experience. These 

 are tests positive and negative of consilience and mutual 

 consistency parallel to those applied to the judgments which 

 it is the business of the methods to connect. We cannot 

 prove the validity of logical methods by deducing them 

 from something else ; we can substantiate them by show- 

 ing that they are consilient. 



The principles which embody these methods will be the 

 legitimate principles of reasoning, and the body of thought 

 formed on these principles will be rationally formed and is 

 rightly held valid. But this is precisely the conception of 

 method to which our analysis of the actual logic of science 

 led up, and into which it has now been our business to 

 examine. 



The view of rational thought put forward here is con- 

 firmed by the actual character of our knowledge, and its 

 points of strength and weakness. In the rough our 

 common-sense knowledge forms a coherent system ; that 

 is to say through 99 hundredths of our daily life we find 

 our grounded expectations fulfilled. Our world is orderly, 



