When you encounter a question about which there is a controversy, and where the adherents of both sides nearly equal each other in number and intellectual status, you may be almost certain that each side has caught sight of some truth, but that neither has seen the whole truth; and you should endeavor to unite both sides by a broader and deeper solution. A classic philosophical example of this method is Herbert Spencer’s attempt to reconcile science and religion, and his effort to unite the “intuitional” and “experiential” schools of thought. The intuitionists maintained that the mind had from birth intuitions by which it knew certain truths independently of experience. Such truths as the axiom that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, or that it is morally wrong to do certain acts, were regarded as among these intuitions. The “empiricists” or “sensationalists,” on the other hand, maintained that all our knowledge—even of such a fact, for instance, as that two and two are four, where we cannot conceive otherwise—is learned solely from the individual’s experience, taken in its broadest sense. Herbert Spencer thought he recognized some truth in both these doctrines, and came forward with the theory that there are certain truths which are intuitions so far as the individual is concerned, but that these intuitions have been inherited from our ancestors, were originally built up through the ages, and represent the accumulated experience of the race. Whatever may be thought of Spencer’s success in this case, the value of the method itself is undoubted. It was frequently used by Kant, Hegel, Fichte and other German philosophers. I have remarked that it is almost possible to sum up the entire process of thinking as the occurrence of suggestions for the solution of difficulties and the testing out of those suggestions. The constructive methods discussed were called means for making good suggestions occur to us. From this standpoint the cautions with which we have just been dealing may be considered as tests of suggestions.