2oo POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



in human values and the resultant spontaneity — and this is then your 

 dilemma. You find the two parts of your qucesitum hopelessly sepa- 

 rated, you find empiricism with irreligion; or else a rationalistic phi- 

 losophy that indeed may call itself religious but that keeps out of all 

 definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows. 



I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to 

 realize fully what I mean by the last reproach, so I will dwell a little 

 longer on that unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your 

 serious believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled. 



I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which 

 a student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point 

 so clearly that I am sorry I can not read them to you now. This 

 young man, who was a graduate of some western college, began by 

 saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered 

 a philosophic class-room you had to open relations with a universe 

 entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The 

 two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that 

 you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. 

 The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs 

 is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and 

 perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces 

 you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are 

 absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason 

 trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and 

 dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple 

 shining on a hill. 



In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than 

 a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rational- 

 ist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic 

 character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our con- 

 crete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a 

 remedy, a way of escape. 



Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is 

 utterly alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete. Re- 

 finement is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They 

 exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation 

 which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all 

 seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, 

 on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the 

 wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether ' refined ' is the 

 one inevitable adjective that springs to your lips, when you endeavor 

 to express the temperament of what you see. 



Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy 

 that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the em- 



