Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/118

 102 CRITICAL NOTICES : harmonious. His sentiments allow fair play to one another and do not attempt to restrain each other's legitimate activity. In the second place, his thought is not in conflict, because he is unconscious of its implicit contradictions. But this kind of har- mony is not due to the presence of systematic association, but to the degree in which it is absent. And if we consider this first and highest type in our author's classification as a whole, we shall see that it bears something of this character, the unconsciousness of contradiction rather than its absence, and therefore the absence of strife among its ideas. For its logic is instinctive ; it reaches its conclusions by no conscious method ; and if among a few men of genius, these conclusions, were they subjected to the analysis of logicians, would be judged to be relatively coherent, their case would be exceptional. Surely those whose thought is the most coherent are the great thinkers whose relative consistency is the result of deliberate purpose. But their highly systematised thought often attains consistency at the cost of sacrificing some aspect of the world. They have lost balance in attaining to consistency. This is another meaning of the balanced mind which it is difficult to explain by systematic association. The outranciers and the specialists, M. Paulhan remarks, exhibit this loss of balance in a greater degree, and wide realms of fact remain uninterpreted by their too narrow systems. That mind will be better balanced which rests on a broader and more complex basis of fact, and balance, in this sense, will depend, not on systematic association, but on the wealth of experience and the richness of the mind itself. For the mind will be better balanced the more many-sided it is, because of the greater variety of experience which it can assimilate. Now the ideal philosopher is one who forms not merely a harmonious system of thought, but whose system is so many-sided and com- plex that it is adapted to the complexity of the world. In him the most perfect balance of thought is united with perfect co- herence and consistency. But often the systematic association which effects the coherence will effect it by the sacrifice of balance : and often the balance will be effected by the relative absence or restriction of systematic association. The degree of balance will not then always coincide with the degree of systematic association ; and so far as this is the case the highest of M. Paulhan's types will fall outside the principle by which he attempts to classify them. Let us now bring together the different meanings which we have come to distinguish in the ambiguous term " harmony, "as applied to the balanced type. (1) There is the harmony which means the absence of explicit contradiction. A man's inconsistent opinions do not conflict because they are not brought together. Their harmony is due to the relative inefficiency of systematic associa- tion, not to the degree of its perfection. (2) There is the harmony which means the relative absence of implicit contradictions. The " instinctive " logic of M. Paulhan's highest type may be so