36 PART I THE PROBLEM. 



where the irrationality is less marked. Naturally, too, as we 

 advance in age and grow in wisdom we become more and more 

 irrational, since we employ more and more aids and means 

 whose intent eventually escapes us wholly or in great measure. 

 Habit grows out of habit until w r e find a vast congeries of 

 habits, practically each modified by each in a composite direction 

 difficult to detect. Moreover, the irrationality is magnified, 

 because unpremeditated and piecemeal adaptations play, apart 

 even from feelings and sentiments, a conspicuous part in the 

 process of mental growth. 



The conclusion is, accordingly, inevitable that an absolutist 

 and atomist logic is impossible, for the reason that the human 

 mind is relativist and organic in structure. Our memory is 

 radically faulty, and our many urging desires add to the dis- 

 order by annihilating almost everything of an explanatory or 

 rational nature. Normally we do not act, therefore, in con- 

 formity with reason; but in agreement with character, i.e., in 

 accordance with a mass of more or less interconnected habits. 



II. THOUGHT AS A PAN-HUMAN PRODUCT. 



10. Were this all, we might conceivably recover most of 

 the threads which connect our mental life at every stage, by 

 preserving faithful and complete accounts of what happens to 

 a particular human being from infancy to maturity. In this 

 way we should ultimately recognise the raison d'etre of thought 

 and understand ourselves. Yet, granted that we could reduce 

 to calculable terms our instincts and our emotions, and granted 

 that we could follow the super-chemistry of thought in the in- 

 fant and the young child, we should not really have advanced 

 far, for thought is inter-individual and inter-social, and develops 

 through the ages, from primitive times forward. Our imaginary 

 observer would be obliged therefore not only to follow the life 

 of one individual, but the life of the whole of humanity from 

 ape-hood upwards, and he would notice that each generation 

 transmits to its successor a bulkier and further metamorphosed 

 bundle of habits in the form of records, traditions, customs, 

 and manners even more irrational or incomplete than those 

 passed on by one moment to another in the history of the indi- 

 vidual. 



III. THE MAN OF GENIUS. 



11. If towering geniuses existed who revolutionise the 

 whole world of thought in their time, as the popular imagination 

 is fond of surmising, much might be effected to re-form the 

 trend of life on the high plane of reason by learning how their 

 mind functions. Such geniuses, however, belong to the realm 

 of fables. 1 The fancy evolves these by attributing to them, on 



1 For one of many examples of the deep indebtedness of our leading 

 thinkers, see "A Commemoration of Auguste Comte", by H. Gordon Jones, 



