means the ability to turn facta to account for the purposes of the accepted conventions, to give a large effect to the situation in terms of the pecuniary conventions in force."
The spiritual attitude given by this training in reaHoning (£e jure, from pecuniary premises to pecuniary conclusions, is necessarily conservative. This species of reasoning assumes the vaUdity of the conventionally established postulates, and is consequently unable to take a sceptical attitude toward these I postulates or toward the institutions in which theae postulates are embodied. It may lead to scepticism touching other, older, institutions that are at variance with its own (natural-rights) postulates, but its scepticism cannot touch the natural-rights ground on which it rests its own case. In the same manner, of course, the thinking which runs in mat^ial causal sequence cannot take a sceptical attitude toward its fundamental postulate, the law of cause and effect ; but since reasoning on this materialistic basis does not visibly go to uphold the received