g that the difference is really less vital and
corresponds to a difference of methods or of the spheres within which
each mode of thought may be valid. To obtain the point of view from
which such a conciliation is possible should be, I hold, one main end of
modern philosophising.

The effect of this profound intellectual difference is complicated by
other obvious influences. There is, in the first place, the difference
of intellectual horizon. Each man has a world of his own and sees a
different set of facts. Whether his horizon is that which is visible
from his parish steeple or from St. Peter's at Rome, it is still
strictly limited: and the outside universe, known vaguely and
indirectly, does not affect him like the facts actually present to his
perception. The most candid thinkers will come to different conclusions
when they are really provided with different sets of fact. In political
and social problems every man's opinions are moulded by his social
station. The artisan's view of the capitalist, and the capitalist's view
of the artisan, are both imperfect, because each has a first-hand
knowledge of his own class alone: and, however anxious to be fair, each
will take a very different view of the working of political
institutions. An apparent concord often covers the widest divergence
under the veil of a common formula, because each man has his private
mode of interpreting general phrases in terms of concrete fact.

This, of course, implies the further difference arising from the
passions which, however illogically, go so far to determine opinions.
Here we have the most general source of difficulty in considering the
actual history of a creed. We cannot limit ourselves to the purely
logical factor. All thought has to start from postulates. Men have to
act before they think: before, at any rate, reasoning becomes distinct
from imagining or guessing. To explain in early periods is to fancy and
to take a fancy for a perception. The world of the primitive man is
constructed not only from vague conjectures and hasty analogies but from
his hopes and fears, and bears the impress of his emotional nature. When
progress takes place some of his beliefs are confirmed, some disappear,
and others are transformed: and the whole history of thought is a
history of this gradual process of verification. We begin, it is said,
by assuming: we proceed by verifying, and we only end by demonstrating.
The process is comparatively simple in