Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/49

Rh assumes that their standard has an identity of its own, which does not vary with the experiences to which it is applied. It would be impossible for him to picture reason as merely a sensitive tentacle by which an individual organism pushes its way forward into effective co-operation with its environment.

Is he not, then, one of us? Does he not reflect our own familiar hesitations and limitations? Is he not of our own time and range? We, too, are feeling the full force of these practical values which determine our thinking. We, too, recognize the purposive character of our ordinary intellectual schematization. We, too, are vividly aware of the strange variety of accumulated influences which enter into our practical judgements, and how delicate and manifold a business it is to weigh out, in balances, the forces that, out of a mass of half-conscious experience, focus themselves finally into a verdict.

Who can give to these determinants any fixed logical rule of valuation? What dialectical arithmetic is equal to the subtlety of these calculations? Can we follow the movement of reason to its conclusion, any more than we can track the flight of a bird through the air that closes behind it as it passes? And can we distribute the weight of individual progression, or discount the personal equation?

There are probabilities of every range and scale; probabilities within probabilities. And the intellectual effect that they produce can only be accounted for through the delicacies and intricacies of psychological analysis. And, moreover, there is an unsounded subconscious world pushing upward, by irruption and invasion, and making its own disturbing contribution to the result. So we learn; so we feel; so we know. And Butler would have entered with zest into all this novel psychology of our day, and would have revelled in exhibiting the selective fertility with which our experience created its own values out of the qualities of its moral character and purpose.