372 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



the principles by which it is guided. The prime feature 

 which distinguishes this movement from the work of 

 common sense is the emergence of the idea of systematic 

 interconnection from its position as an underlying principle 

 into the forefront of the struggle as the avowed object of 

 effort. The exactness of science and its disengagement from 

 practical interests are corollaries of this principle. But 

 secondly, the idea of system necessitates in the way 

 described a criticism of method, and thirdly, the result 

 of this criticism is a remodelling of the whole conception 

 of experience and the truth that can be built upon experi- 

 ence, in such a way as to evaluate the work of mind, and 

 determine the relation of thought to reality. Explicit 

 systematisation, criticism of thought processes, and the 

 consequent " return to reality," are thus the three factors 

 determining the philosophic movement of thought. In 

 other words, here, as in the other advances of thought 

 that we have traced, the methods of lower phases are 

 made explicit, and as a consequence the character of the 

 systematisation is remodelled. Ordinary human thought 

 makes explicit the universal that underlies animal ex- 

 perience. Philosophy makes explicit the principles of 

 correlation that underlie the use of the universal. And 

 thus, while the bodies of common-sense knowledge are 

 fragmentary and rough-hewn, the ideal philosophic system 

 is an accurate piecing together of experience into a single 

 coherent whole. Thus philosophy grows out of common 

 sense, and completes its work. But it completes it only 

 by taking it to pieces and putting it together again. It 

 is ordinary thought not merely extended, but in a measure 

 transformed. 



Philosophy then, in its narrower sense as the analysis of 

 mind, may be said to deal with the conditions under which 

 the general truths and inferences of common sense arose. 

 Meanwhile the sciences deal with what is in a sense the 

 same problem in a different form. For, as we have seen, 

 they trace the rough rules of common sense to the true 

 universals that underlie them, and out of these universals 

 they make their system. Finally, philosophy in the wider 

 sense is the effort towards the ideal unification of these 



