316 PSYCHOLOGY. 



in whicli belief consists. To quote from a remarkable 

 book : 



" This law that our consciousness constantly tends to the minimum 

 of complexity and to the maximum of definiteness, is of great impor- 

 tance for all our knowledge. . . . Our own activity of attention will thus 

 determine what we are to know and what we are to believe. If things 

 have more than a certain complexity, not only will our limited powers 

 ■of attention forbid us to unravel this complexity, but we shall strongly 

 desire to believe the things much simpler than they are. For our 

 thoughts about them will have a constant tendency to become as simple 

 and definite as possible. Put a man into a perfect chaos of phenomena 

 — sounds, sights, feelings — and if the man continued to exist, and to 

 be rational at all, his attention would doubtless soon find for him a way 

 to make up some kind of rhythmic regularity, which he would impute 

 to the things about him, so as to imagine that he had discovered some 

 laws of sequence in this mad new world. And thus, in every case 

 where we fancy ourselves sure of a simple law of Nature, we must re- 

 member that a great deal of the fancied simplicity may be due, in the 

 given case, not to Nature, but to the ineradicable prejudice of our own 

 minds in favor of regularity and simplicity. All our thoughts are de- 

 termined, in great measui-e, by this law of least effort, as it is found 

 exemplified in our activity of attention. . . . The aim of the whole 

 process seems to be to reach as complete and united a conception of 

 reality as possible, a conception wherein the greatest fulness of data 

 shall be combined with the greatest simplicity of conception. The effort 

 of consciousness seems to be to combine the greatest richness of content 

 with the greatest definiteness of organization."* 



The richness is got by including all the facts of sense 

 in the scheme ; the simplicity, by deducing them out of the 

 smallest possible number of permaneut and independent 

 primordial entities : the definite organization, by assimi- 

 lating these latter to ideal objects between w^hicli relations 

 of an inwardly rational sort obtain. What these ideal ob- 

 jects and rational relations are will require a separate 

 chapter to show.f Meanwhile, enough has surely been said 

 to justify the assertion made above that no general offliand 

 answer can be given as to which objects mankind shall 

 choose as its realities. The fight is still under way. Our 

 minds are yet chaotic ; and at best we make a mixture and 



* J. Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885), pp 

 317-57. 



\ Chapter XXVII. 



