suppositions. In particular, I wished to draw attention to the strength of the unconscious presuppositions of those who (sometimes) suppose themselves to be without presuppositions at all. And then, in connection with this thought of their unacknowledged, and often illegitimate, weight in the arguments of those whom I was criticising, I added some observations-which plainly were too short and incidental for their purpose-upon the proper place of presuppositions in thought.

Under the circumstances, I will venture to add a few more words on this point. But before doing so I must insist, in the plainest way, that whether I have been able to analyze this relation with more success, or with less, my own book stands or falls, not according to my success or failure in this analysis, but according to its own attempt to give an intelligent, rational, and judicial marshalling and interpretation of the evidence of the actual historical facts.

I ask, and have asked, for nothing but what is severely rational. But then I must point out, that a great deal of what may be rightly called presupposition is, whether we like it or no, an absolute sine qua non for rational intelligence. The claim to be unprejudiced, in the exaggerated form in which it is in the present generation popular, is, on analysis really incompatible with reason. For prejudice indeed in the sense of wilful selfblinding, or tampering (whether more or less) with intellectual conscience, I have not one word of apology. But so far as the word 'prejudice' may be capable of being understood as referring to that

antecedent content of mind and character which, in fact, largely affects a man's reception of evidence, it is intellectually indispensable for any power of apprehending truth at all. The whole antecedent content of mind and character constitutes, of necessity, a mental mould, into which evidence is not unaffected by entering; and makes a natural, or quasi-instinctive, capacity of insight, of some kinds, or in some directions, rather than others. This mental content, the result of all previous experience, constitutes a man's capacity of rational assimilation. It is his trained insight, which he should be at once using and correcting by usebut using at least as freely as correcting. It is not in spite of certainties already reached, but by their help, that new truth is to be seen; even though the insight of truth may itself react upon them; and they always are ready to be modified in the interest of truth.

In saying this, I am not offering an apology, as if for a certain pardonable suspension or modification of rational process. On the contrary, I am describing rational process itself. It is precisely this which constitutes its character as rational.

There are those who claim to have no previous convictions; and there are those who recognize what they have only, in effect, to hold a brief against them, or try to be as if they had them not. I do not believe that either of these mental conditions is ideally right for insight into truth. The attempt to put previous experience wholly aside, is really an attempt to decide upon imperfect evidence; for both the previous experience in itself,

and the coherence of the new data with the previous experience, were legitimate elements in the total evidence. To put previous convictions aside, just in proportion as it is done with approximate completeness, is to produce a decision unfairly weighted in the direction of paradox. The attempt at fairness, too superficially made, has become a bias more or less profound, towards contradicting, rather than conforming with, the presuppositions of antecedent experience. On the other hand, a mind that was really like a sheet of blank paper would have no power of insight into anything at all. The conditions of knowledge and judgement being what they are, a thoughtful man does well to be conscious of the extent to which his conclusions upon any given evidence are conditioned by (even when they modify) his preassumptions; and should endeavour rather to scrutinize, to justify, or to correct, his preassumptions than to deny that he has them.

Whereas, then, there is a kind of 'prejudice' which is inseparable from any power of reasonable apprehension, I would urge that the claim to be 'wholly unprejudiced' should be modified by a conception-if not humbler, at all events more complex and truthful-as to the necessary conditions of thinking; that instead of claiming to be wholly unbiassed, the mind that wishes to be scrupulously fair should rather acknowledge, and accept, and consciously scrutinize the bias which it cannot be without.

It hardly ought to be necessary, at the present time, to be seriously insisting on principles like

these; but since it seems still sometimes to be assumed that absence of presuppositions is the right mental condition for impartial appreciation of evidence, I must submit instead, first, that this is not a real possibility at all; and secondly, that, if it were, it would not be a right condition for apprehending truth. The condition required for truly weighing evidence is to approach it with the right and not the wrong presuppositions. I wish so far to shift the inquiry from the application of first principles to the first principles themselves. Of course I believe in fact that my own first principles- such, e. g. as belief in God, in the Incarnation, in the Holy Spirit, in a Church with divinely-appointed ministries and sacraments—are But that is not at all my point. My point is that the conclusions to be reached so largely consist of necessary applications of such first principles, that it is the first principles themselves which most need to be examined; because it is only in the light of these that the things which are to them subordinate and accessory can themselves be rightly discerned. I am not asking to have my presuppositions blindly assumed. I am asking to have the place and importance of presuppositions recognized; and so to have the presuppositions, as such, deliberately and on both sides, cross-examined.

true.

I know that to some readers the plea of my preface has meant no more than an avowal of incapacity for fair-minded appreciation of evidence. Would it be wrong to suggest that such readers are still under the dominion of a very crudely

objective conception of thought? I cannot help thinking that we are likely, in the future, to be more accustomed to the other way of putting it. Perhaps our critics in the future will be, in their turn, no less confident—perhaps no less one-sided -in insisting that the simplest of propositions can be made only by a person; and that the consciousness of the person who makes the proposition is of necessity a determining ingredient in the meaning, to him, of the proposition which he makes. After all, even the proposition 'two and two make four' is mere meaningless sound except as the apprehension of an apprehending mind; there may be many different nuances of meaning in the statement that 'it is wise to be virtuous'; whilst the words, 'I believe in God,' are capable of as many degrees of significance as there are varying capacities of personal consciousness. But at least I think I may plead that there is, in any act of personal thought or judgement, a personal factor which is both legitimate and necessary; and that the place and meaning of the personal factor is ignored overmuch by those who aim at fairness in too offhand a way.

Our central convictions necessarily colour all our thought. They would do so, to a large extent, even if they were irrational 'prejudices.' They do so not the less, but much the more, when they are themselves the conscious outcome of all in us that is most deeply rational, most largely and vitally conversant with real truth. As long as I doubt whether to believe in God or no, the phenomena of primitive religion or the presence of pain in the