380 Science Religion and Reality 



in a " common sense " attitude, from which the religious valuation 

 of the world has quite disappeared. Its practical outcome was 

 utilitarianism, which, though philosophically weak, provided many 

 excellent men with a calculus of personal conduct and of social 

 reform. I shall not attempt any description or criticism of specula- 

 tive idealism, as expounded in the numerous disciples of Hegel. 

 The tide is running strongly against this type of philosophy. But 

 I agree with Sir Henry Jones, that " the intellectual ardour of the 

 world cannot be damped, far less extinguished, by any theory, 

 blindly advanced in the interests of religion, of the radical insecurity 

 of knowledge, or of the incompetence and untrustworthiness of 

 human reason." 



The special quarrel of the modern schools with the idealists 

 is connected with the repudiation by the former of " absolutism." 

 Here I must take leave to paraphrase from what I have already 

 written (" Faith and its Psychology," 1909). To give up the 

 conception of reality as a single system would be to give up both 

 philosophy and science. If the world is " wild," as William James 

 thinks, only wild men, whom we do not permit to be at large, would 

 be at home in it. " And yet so great is the fear engendered by the 

 conception of a cosmos which shuts man up in an iron framework, 

 that we find Lotze reducing natural laws to mere conceptual 

 generalisations ; we find Ritschlians warning the intelligence away 

 from the domain of religion ; we find Professor James and his 

 followers constructing the universe of enigmatical atoms dignified 

 by the name of persons, and rushing into polytheism." 



We cannot regard particular facts as real, and the laws which 

 connect and regulate them as only subjective. " Mere ideas " 

 cannot bind together " real objects." Or if the objects also are 

 said to be subjective, everything disappears at once into dreamland, 

 including the reasons for doubt. The sceptic cannot throw his 

 opponent if his own feet are in the air. 



We pursue the absolute, not because we are " intellectualists," 

 but because we must. The opponent of absolutism generally sets 

 up an Absolute of his own without knowing it. Even the principle 

 of relativity has become, with some of its defenders, a kind of 

 absolute. 



The objection to intellectualism loses its force if we use intelli- 

 gence in the Platonic sense, not of the logic-chopping faculty, but 

 of the whole personality become self-conscious and self-directing. 



