xvi SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 373 



processes, the system of adequately defined truths in which 

 contradictions are resolved, and errors and half truths alike 

 explained. Putting these points together, we may formulate 

 the work of systematic thought in general as the effort to 

 discover the conditions under which the general truths of 

 common sense arise, and by the correlation of these deeper 

 truths to complete the systematisation of experience. 



5. Self-conscious development. 



The ideal unity of thought is, as has been indicated, 

 rather a " regulative concept " than an attainable goal. 

 But there is a point in the movement which it guides 

 which may also be very remote, but whether remote or 

 near, seems to indicate the natural terminus of the whole 

 development which we have been following. We can 

 conceive as not indefinitely remote a stage of knowledge in 

 which the human species should come to understand its 

 own development, its history, conditions, and possibilities, 

 and on the basis of such an understanding should direct 

 its own future, just as an individual who thoroughly 

 understands himself and the conditions of his life may 

 mark out his career for himself. Such a development 

 must be intellectual on the one side and ethical on the 

 other. Intellectually, the whole progress of the sciences 

 and philosophy may be regarded as so many steps towards 

 it, the lower sciences as giving man control of nature, the 

 higher as yielding the requisite knowledge of human life, 

 physical, mental, and social. Moreover, as Comte and 

 others have shown, the lower or more abstract sciences lead 

 up to the higher or more concrete, Mathematics to physics, 

 physics and chemistry to biology, biology to the mental 

 and social sciences. If we imagine the higher sciences as 

 complete as they are at present rudimentary, we should have 

 in them a general theoretical account of the conditions of 

 human development, physical and moral. Thus prolonging 

 in imagination the line of mental development traced in the 

 foregoing pages, we are led to the conception of a scheme 

 embracing the whole problem of human life and destiny 

 on earth. We start with a consciousness limited to 

 the reaction of the moment, and knowing nothing of the 

 past which determines its action, nor of the future which 



