h mind and its purposes
can attain practical efficacy, is simply the world constructed by
categories found to yield a constant, sufficient, and consistent object.
Having attained this conception, we justly call it the truth and
measure the intellectual value of all other constructions by their
affinity to that rational vision.

Such a rational vision has not yet been attained by mankind, but it
would be absurd to say that because we have not fully nor even
proximately attained it, we have not gained any conception whatever of a
reliable and intelligible world. The modicum of rationality achieved in
the sciences gives us a hint of a perfect rationality which, if
unattainable in practice, is not inconceivable in idea. So, in still
more inchoate moments of reflection, our ancestors nursed even more
isolated, less compatible, less adequate conceptions than those which
leave our philosophers still unsatisfied. The categories they employed
dominated smaller regions of experience than do the categories of
history and natural science; they had far less applicability to the
conduct of affairs and to the happy direction of life as a whole. Yet
they did yield vision and flashes of insight. They lighted men a step
ahead in the dark places of their careers, and gave them at certain
junctures a sense of creative power and moral freedom. So that the
necessity of abandoning one category in order to use a better need not
induce us to deny that the worse category could draw the outlines of a
sort of world and furnish men with an approach to wisdom. If our
ancestors, by such means, could not dominate life as a whole, neither
can we, in spite of all progress. If literal truth or final
applicability cannot be claimed for their thought, who knows how many
and how profound the revolutions might be which our own thought would
have to suffer if new fields of perception or new powers of synthesis
were added to our endowment?

[Sidenote: Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.]

[Sidenote: A miracle, though unexpected, more intelligible than a
regular process.]

We sometimes speak as if superstition or belief in the miraculous was
disbelief in law and was inspired by a desire to disorganise experience
and defeat intelligence. No supposition could be more erroneous. Every
superstition is a little science, inspired by the desire to understand,
to foresee, or to control the real world. No doubt its hypothesis is
chimerical, arbitrary, and founde