xvi SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 393 



we compared to a syllogism in which the conclusion alone 

 was explicit, the premisses being represented by psychological 

 forces which, without being grasped as such, produced 

 their result. The second stage we took as equivalent to 

 the inference from minor to conclusion, where a major 

 premiss was still unrecognised. In the third stage, the 

 major was brought into the conscious process, and we had 

 major, minor, and conclusion explicitly recognised as a 

 coherent whole. It remains that in this last stage the 

 theory of syllogism, the character of the Universal and the 

 Particular, the assumptions involved in reasoning, in a 

 word, the whole thought-process operating as a psycho- 

 logical force in the lower stages, should be analysed out, 

 and become, like its data and its products, an object of 

 examination and criticism. The highest operation of 

 thought, as we know it, is to be conscious of its own prin- 

 ciples. And this applies, of course, to the moral and 

 practical as well as to the theoretical functions of thought. 

 We demand at this stage a similar analysis of the basis of 

 the moral judgment : of religious conceptions : of the 

 social structure. In the lower stages of human develop- 

 ment these conceptions grow like natural products. 

 Though their life is in the thought and action of intelli- 

 gent individuals, yet the action of man on man, of thought 

 on thought, of the social structure on the individual, of 

 the individual on his environment, is so subtle and so 

 complex that though each step in the progress of any 

 great change may be the conscious act of a rational agent, 

 the change as a whole proceeds unconsciously and without 

 plan. Gradually to weld the vast mass of interrelated 

 cause and effect that constitutes history into an intelligible 

 whole will be the latest result for it is a result not yet 

 achieved of the highest science. In point of explicitness, 

 then, the work of the highest human philosophy is to 

 analyse and bring into its system the principles upon which 

 that system rests. 



These principles form the keystone of the arch, which 

 for the first time embraces the whole of human purpose 

 within its span. In the previous stages we have seen how 

 the organisation of experience began modestly, with the 



