n which it can read future results in present
on-goings, its responsive choice, its partiality to this condition or
that, become intelligent. Its bias grows reasonable. It can
deliberately, intentionally, participate in the direction of the course
of affairs. Its foresight of different futures which result according as
this or that present factor predominates in the shaping of affairs
permits it to partake intelligently instead of blindly and fatally in
the consequences its reactions give rise to. Participate it must, and to
its own weal or woe. Inference, the use of what happens, to anticipate
what will--or at least may--happen, makes the difference between
directed and undirected participation. And this capacity for inferring
is precisely the same as that use of natural occurrences for the
discovery and determination of consequences--the formation of new
dynamic connexions--which constitutes knowledge.

The fact that thought is an intrinsic feature of experience is fatal to
the traditional empiricism which makes it an artificial by-product. But
for that same reason it is fatal to the historic rationalisms whose
justification was the secondary and retrospective position assigned to
thought by empirical philosophy. According to the particularism of the
latter, thought was inevitably only a bunching together of hard-and-fast
separate items; thinking was but the gathering together and tying of
items already completely given, or else an equally artificial untying--a
mechanical adding and subtracting of the given. It was but a cumulative
registration, a consolidated merger; generality was a matter of bulk,
not of quality. Thinking was therefore treated as lacking constructive
power; even its organizing capacity was but simulated, being in truth
but arbitrary pigeon-holing. Genuine projection of the novel,
deliberate variation and invention, are idle fictions in such a version
of experience. If there ever was creation, it all took place at a remote
period. Since then the world has only recited lessons.

The value of inventive construction is too precious to be disposed of in
this cavalier way. Its unceremonious denial afforded an opportunity to
assert that in addition to experience the subject has a ready-made
faculty of thought or reason which transcends experience. Rationalism
thus accepted the account of experience given by traditional empiricism,
and introduced reason as extra-empirical. There are still thinkers who
reg