340 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



essential to the movement towards truth, and the test is 

 that by constantly following such methods we arrive 

 repeatedly at a wider and more thorough harmony, we 

 reach points of view which do not simply negate old ones, 

 but rather absorb them and set them in their place as partial 

 and incomplete elements. But so to conceive knowledge 

 is to conceive it as essentially a growth. The time will 

 come when sacred Ilium, the highest point of view which 

 we can reach or the inmost citadel of our faith in life, will 

 in turn be overcome. Within the Empire of a greater 

 truth it will figure as a detail which we misunderstood while 

 we cherished it. Thus, if our confidence in anything that 

 we can know or believe has reasonable justification, it is 

 not because that thing is known once for all, but because 

 it is a genuine and essential phase in the growing formation 

 of truth. 



But if, in the search for logic and for certainty, we are 

 thrown back on growth, the lines of growth assume a 

 fundamental importance. Whatever we know of them 

 becomes the most vital part of our knowledge, and though 

 here, again, we are fully subject to all the old limitations 

 in forming our point of view, yet it remains that the best 

 conception attainable of the movement is necessary to the 

 full formulation of the reasonable and the true as far as we 

 can know them. If the life of rational thought consists in 

 development on certain lines, to say that development can 

 never mature is to threaten the life itself. 



But may it not be, the doubting question will recur, that 

 in formulating the conditions of development we are 

 tempted to ask too much. Let us admit that Reason is at 

 bottom the impulse towards the comprehension of Reality 

 as an organic system. Is it not possible that this impulse, 

 valid and valuable within its own limits, is yet applicable 

 only to part of Reality? May there not be an irrational 

 element, essentially inexplicable, irreducible to system, 

 knowable as we know brute facts that are not explained, 

 not intelligible because not in fact conforming to the con- 

 ditions of intelligibility ? Let us observe, first, that if this 

 be true it would not affect one part of our previous reason- 

 ing. Reality, as far as it is intelligible, would fall within 



