338 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



at once confronted by two alternatives. Either we must 

 take this cause a mere part of our system as an uncon- 

 ditioned datum, or we must go beyond the system to an 

 anterior existence. In either case, the system fails to 

 realise its pretensions. It follows, that in a complete 

 system, any point that we start from as the cause of what 

 follows, must itself be determined by what follows, which 

 is possible only if its inherent tendency to bring about the 

 resulting process is the condition of its own existence. 

 That is to say, it must be purposive, and we are brought 

 back to the same conception of the process of reality, as 

 conditioning and conditioned by purpose, as before. But 

 the result we have now reached is this that whatever be 

 our capacity or incapacity to deal with Reality as a whole, 

 whatever within Reality is fully understood, is part of an 

 organic system. If this is so, this organicity is true of 

 Reality as a whole, not in the sense that it is only in a 

 summed-up infinite that it is realised, but in the sense that 

 it expresses the final central essence of the Real, wherever 

 it be taken, provided it be fully understood. 



The organic character of Reality then is deducible from 

 a postulate of thought. But what validity attaches to such 

 a postulate ? If it is something so implied in the reason- 

 ing process that, if it is true, reasoning is valid, and if it is 

 false, reasoning is invalid, then its certainty is equal to that 

 of any rationally established truth, and with that result, 

 after our previous enquiry into the validity of reasoning, 

 we are content. 



But can this be shown ? What is postulated is the possi- 

 bility of a completed system. Such a system is the ideal 

 of thought, but can we say that its possibility is a principle 

 without which thought cannot work ? It is one thing to say 

 that the work of thought is that of systematising, and 

 another to postulate that its work will some day be com- 

 plete. Provided the principles that it uses in the work 

 of systematising be sound, is it not possible that the work 

 should go on without end, the value lying always in the 

 solid fabric achieved at any given time and in the living 

 impulse to extend it, not in the goal or ideal towards which 

 the impulse appears to move? Perhaps the fable of the 



