philosophy could furnish a substitute. But dogmatism is
merely a matter of degree. Some thinkers and some systems retreat
further than others into the stratum beneath current conventions and
make us more conscious of the complex machinery which, working silently
in the soul, makes possible all the rapid and facile operations of
reason. The deeper this retrospective glance the less dogmatic the
philosophy. A primordial constitution or tendency, however, must always
remain, having structure and involving a definite life; for if we
thought to reach some wholly vacant and indeterminate point of origin,
we should have reached something wholly impotent and indifferent, a
blank pregnant with nothing that we wished to explain or that actual
experience presented. When, starting with the inevitable preformation
and constitutional bias, we sought to build up a simpler and nobler
edifice of thought, to be a palace and fortress rather than a prison for
experience, our critical philosophy would still be dogmatic, since it
would be built upon inexplicable but actual data by a process of
inference underived but inevitable.

[Sidenote: A choice of hypotheses.]

No doubt Aristotle and the scholastics were often uncritical. They were
too intent on building up and buttressing their system on the broad
human or religious foundations which they had chosen for it. They nursed
the comfortable conviction that whatever their thought contained was
eternal and objective truth, a copy of the divine intellect or of the
world's intelligible structure. A sceptic may easily deride that
confidence of theirs; their system may have been their system and
nothing more. But the way to proceed if we wish to turn our shrewd
suspicions and our sense of insecurity into an articulate conviction and
to prove that they erred, is to build another system, a more modest one,
perhaps, which will grow more spontaneously and inevitably in the mind
out of the data of experience. Obviously the rival and critical theory
will make the same tacit claim as the other to absolute validity. If all
our ideas and perceptions conspire to reinforce the new hypothesis, this
will become inevitable and necessary to us. We shall then condemn the
other hypothesis, not indeed for having been a hypothesis, which is the
common fate of all rational and interpretative thought, but for having
been a hypothesis artificial, misleading, and false; one not following
necessarily nor intelligibly o