Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/495

THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. 479 asserts itself against the actual, forcing us to realise that it is only conditionally true, that it can only become so as we bring our actual concepts into harmony with it ; or (as we have preferred to express it) that our actual concepts are not really true and real at all and can only become so by having their nature so altered as to conform to the ideal. This al- teration, we have seen, takes place in two directions that of extension and that of coherence ; and this twofold character is emphasised in the history of mind by the alternation of periods of specialisation in which facts are accumulated with periods of speculation in which they are harmonised and ex- plained. This tendency of these two sides to fall apart in actual life has led some writers to represent them as not merely different but actually opposed to each other and requiring to be har- monised by a kind of compromise. 1 But these are not two different ideals but different sides, of one and the same. In any genuine piece of scientific research the accumulation of facts is always controlled by unifying intelligence. In the pursuit of knowledge the human mind cannot really go on adding fact to fact without some effort after inner organ- isation, any more than in the pursuit of happiness it can go out to new objects of interest without some attempt at co-ordinating them with the old. On the other hand, just as the instability of a life which is founded on too narrow a principle, e.g., money-getting, is the source of moral progress in individuals and nations forcing them in a crisis to recognise that there is more in life than their philosophy has dreamed of, so it is the continual develop- ment of contradictions within the unity which our thought has already established among the facts that drives it on to a more comprehensive view, and, as Bradley says, compels it to take the road of indefinite expansion. All this will be clearer presently when we go on to discuss the relation of this formal account of the goal of knowledge to the concrete reality. Meantime an example taken almost at random may assist us to understand how fact and theory act and react on each other in these respects. When Prof. Seeley in his posthumous work on the History of British Diplomacy proceeds to examine the character of the fact we know as the English Revolution he finds the usual account of it which attributes an im- portant and all-pervasive change to the insignificant cause 1 See James in his recently published vol., The Will to Believe, Essay on the " Sentiment of Rationality," p. 65 foil.