Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly
alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete. REFINEMENT 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 descriptive adjective that
springs to your lips.
Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy
that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the
empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of
artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their
backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and
spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy's dust off their feet
and following the call of the wild.
Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with
which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind.
Leibnitz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in
facts than most rationalist minds can show.
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