And
so forth--your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical,
never straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one
plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of
successive hours.
But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are
worthy of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much
inconsistency and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a
good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles
from opposite sides of the line.
And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish
to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity
in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may
say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not
neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious.
Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and
let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-
podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he
find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He
wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And
being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he
naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom
he finds already in the field.
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