346 HUMANISM xvm 



facto include an intellectually insoluble puzzle which would 

 render it fundamentally unknowable. Nay, more, is not 

 the supposition directly self- contradictory ? Does not 

 a knowable world satisfy at least one of our emotional 

 demands, the desire for Knowledge? It cannot be 

 then, as alleged, utterly out of relation to our emotional 

 nature. But if it can satisfy one such postulate, why not 

 the rest ? 



The ideals, then, stand and fall together. They are 

 rooted in the unity of the human soul, in the final soli 

 darity of life s endeavours. And when the supreme need 

 arises, the outcry of the soul can summon to its aid all 

 the powers that minister unto its being ; it wields a spell 

 that reaches from the iciest altitudes of scientific abstraction 

 to the warmest pulsations of concrete emotion, and from 

 the most ethereal fancy of the purest intellect to the 

 blindest impulse of agonizing passion ; it can extort from 

 every element of our nature the confession of its solidarity 

 with the rest of life, and set it in array on that dread 

 battlefield whereon the Gods contend against the Giants 

 of Doubt, Disorder, and Despair. 



For it is because of this solidarity of the ideals that 

 the denial of them confronts us with the gravest issues. 

 They all assert, in varying form but with unvarying 

 intent, the same great principle the conformity of the 

 world with the capacity of our nature. And unfamiliar 

 as some of the applications of this principle may be to 

 our ordinary habits of thinking, we have to remember 

 that the principle itself can hardly be impugned. For 

 inasmuch as in the end our world is human experience, 

 and a world which we neither did nor could experience 

 would not be one we need argue or trouble about, this 

 principle really amounts to an assertion of the intrinsic 

 coherence and potential harmony of the whole of 

 experience. Without it where should we be? What 

 would our attitude have to be towards a world in which 

 the ultimate significance of our ideals was denied, that is, 

 a world which was no world, a world in which nothing 

 really meant anything, nothing was really good or 



