xvii STAGES OF CORRELATION 409 



the whole future of the race. From race-experience in 

 that widest sense in which moral, spiritual, and imagi- 

 native experience are comprehended is derived that 

 understanding of man's own nature, the meaning of his 

 life on earth, by which action is so shaped as to bring 

 about the consummation in which the human spirit 

 " comes to itself," and in so doing enters on its kingdom. 

 We express this by saying that the conditions and character 

 of human development are made the basis of conduct 

 directed to the perfection of that development. 



At this point the hereditary factor undergoes its final 

 transformation. For under one aspect the special work 

 of this stage consists not in eliminating but in evaluating 

 that factor. The methods upon which correlation rests 

 remained unconscious and implicit in the third stage. 

 They are of course methods resting on a hereditary 

 structure modified by such gradual and unnoticed opera- 

 tions of experience as are no more conscious or deliberate 

 in their workings than the growth of physical structure 

 itself. While science and philosophy have to criticise 

 methods of inference, they have also to take account 

 of the limitations of sense-experience limitations of 

 course depending on the inherited structure of the sense 

 organs. But perhaps most important of all is the 

 evaluation of the hereditary factor in the moral con- 

 sciousness. We have seen that in the previous stage the 

 moral impulses gave rise to definitely formulated rules 

 and standards of action. They also fuse with the concep- 

 tions coming from other sources to make the religions of 

 the world. But though they give rise to explicit con- 

 ceptions, they themselves are far from being clearly 

 analysed. Nowhere is the contrast between clearness of 

 result and obscurity of process more marked or of more 

 serious importance than in the sphere of practical conduct. 

 What is contributed by instinct, what by tradition, how 

 much rests on conscious or unconscious adaptation to 

 economic or political circumstances, how far theories of 

 the supernatural have elevated, debased, or in any way 

 modified ethical conceptions, are questions of which ethical 

 theory has hardly yet touched the fringe. The problem 



