What you want is a philosophy that will not only
exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make
some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human
lives.
You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific
loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit
of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old
confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of
the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your
dilemma: you find the two parts of your quaesitum hopelessly
separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or
else you find a rationalistic philosophy 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 this 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 cannot read them to you now.
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