fortunate if we do not grow sick of the sight and sound of it altogether.  Everything is smothered in the litter that is fated to accompany it.  Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything.  Lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches, of tenth-rate men and women, as a condition of the few precious specimens in either kind being realized!  The gold-dust comes to birth with the quartz-sand all around it, and this is as much a condition of religion as of any other excellent possession.  There must be extrication; there must be competition for survival; but the clay matrix and the noble gem must first come into being unsifted.  Once extricated, the gem can be examined separately, conceptualized, defined, and insulated.  But this process of extrication cannot be short-circuited—­or if it is, you get the thin inferior abstractions which we have seen, either the hollow unreal god of scholastic theology, or the unintelligible pantheistic monster, instead of the more living divine reality with which it appears certain that empirical methods tend to connect men in imagination.

Arrived at this point, I ask you to go back to my first lecture and remember, if you can, what I quoted there from your own Professor Jacks—­what he said about the philosopher himself being taken up into the universe which he is accounting for.  This is the fechnerian as well as the hegelian view, and thus our end rejoins harmoniously our beginning.  Philosophies are intimate parts of the universe, they express something of its own thought of itself.  A philosophy may indeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself.  It may, as I said, possess and handle itself differently in consequence of us philosophers, with our theories, being here; it may trust itself or mistrust itself the more, and, by doing the one or the other, deserve more the trust or the mistrust.  What mistrusts itself deserves mistrust.

This is the philosophy of humanism in the widest sense.  Our philosophies swell the current of being, add their character to it.  They are part of all that we have met, of all that makes us be.  As a French philosopher says, ‘Nous sommes du reel dans le reel.’  Our thoughts determine our acts, and our acts redetermine the previous nature of the world.

Thus does foreignness get banished from our world, and far more so when we take the system of it pluralistically than when we take it monistically.  We are indeed internal parts of God and not external creations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system.  Yet because God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system is conceived pluralistically, his functions can be taken as not wholly dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts,—­as similar to our functions consequently.

Having an environment, being in time, and working out a history just like ourselves, he escapes from the foreignness from all that is human, of the static timeless perfect absolute.