It is this progress which we have to understand and imaginatively to conceive. For in conceiving it we conceive the matrix of humanism. In this conception is to be found, I believe, the substitute for that conception of divine government which gives shape and form to the theocratic culture. To replace the conception of man as the subject of a heavenly king, which dominates the whole ancestral order of life, humanism takes as its dominant pattern the progress of the individual from helpless infancy to self-governing maturity. 7. _The Career of the Soul_ If our scientific knowledge of human nature were adequate, we could achieve in the humanistic culture that which all theologies have tried to achieve: we could found [p176] our morality on tested truths. They would be truths about the development of human nature, and not, as in the popular religions, truth of physics and of history. But our knowledge of human nature is inadequate, and therefore, like the teachers of popular religion, we have in place of exact knowledge to invent imaginative fictions in the hope that the progress of science will confirm and correct, but will not utterly contradict, our hypotheses. We can claim no more than this: for our understanding of human nature we are compelled to use our insight and the best available psychological science of our age, exactly as Dante, for his understanding of the divine constitution of the universe, had to use the accepted astronomy of his day. If our psychology turns out to be wrong, the only difference will be that we shall have to discard an hypothesis whereas our forefathers had to discard a revealed dogma. The sketch which I am about to make of the progress from infancy to maturity is to be taken, then, not as tested scientific truth, but as an imaginative construction. It will be, if you like, a modern fable which symbolizes rather than describes, as the primitive legends of the sun god symbolized, rather than described, the observed facts. Because it is an imaginative construction, the same meaning might be expressed in other ways and with many variations of detail. But though the fiction itself is of no consequence, the meaning it conveys is of the highest consequence, and it is confirmed, as I shall attempt to show, not only by ordinary insight but by the deepest wisdom of the greatest teachers.