time or another been presented previously. Still much may be done in the
furthering of one's thought by changing points of view, selecting and
arranging ideas already more or less familiar, so that they may be built
into new combinations; and this, I think, I have in no small degree
accomplished as regards the microcosm of my own mind. But I state this
much only for the sake of adding a confession that, as far as
introspection can carry one, it does not appear to me that the
modifications which my views have undergone since the publication of my
previous _Candid Examination_ are due so much to purely logical
processes of the intellect, as to the sub-conscious (and therefore more
or less unanalyzable) influences due to the ripening experience of life.
The extent to which this is true [i.e. the extent to which experience
modifies logic][36] is seldom, if ever, realized, although it is
practically exemplified every day by the sobering caution which
advancing age exercises upon the mind. Not so much by any above-board
play of syllogism as by some underhand cheating of consciousness, do the
accumulating experiences of life and of thought slowly enrich the
judgement. And this, one need hardly say, is especially true in such
regions of thought as present the most tenuous media for the progress of
thought by the comparatively clumsy means of syllogistic locomotion. For
the further we ascend from the solid ground of verification, the less
confidence should we place in our wings of speculation, while the more
do we find the practical wisdom of such intellectual caution, or
distrust of ratiocination, as can be given only by experience.
Therefore, most of all is this the case in those departments of thought
which are furthest from the region of our sensuous life--viz.
metaphysics and religion. And, as a matter of fact, it is just in these
departments of thought that we find the rashness of youth most amenable
to the discipline in question by the experience of age.