Let me make a few comments, here, on the curious antipathies which these partialities arouse.  They are sovereignly unjust, for all the parties are human beings with the same essential interests, and no one of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often imagines him to be.  Both are loyal to the world that bears them; neither wishes to spoil it; neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence; both want to keep it as a universe of some kind; and their differences are all secondary to this deep agreement.  They may be only propensities to emphasize differently.  Or one man may care for finality and security more than the other.  Or their tastes in language may be different.  One may like a universe that lends itself to lofty and exalted characterization.  To another this may seem sentimental or rhetorical.  One may wish for the right to use a clerical vocabulary, another a technical or professorial one.  A certain old farmer of my acquaintance in America was called a rascal by one of his neighbors.  He immediately smote the man, saying,’I won’t stand none of your diminutive epithets.’  Empiricist minds, putting the parts before the whole, appear to rationalists, who start from the whole, and consequently enjoy magniloquent privileges, to use epithets offensively diminutive.  But all such differences are minor matters which ought to be subordinated in view of the fact that, whether we be empiricists or rationalists, we are, ourselves, parts of the universe and share the same one deep concern in its destinies.  We crave alike to feel more truly at home with it, and to contribute our mite to its amelioration.  It would be pitiful if small aesthetic discords were to keep honest men asunder.

I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism.  But if you look behind the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not find it matricidal.  I am as good a son as any rationalist among you to our common mother.  What troubles me more than this misapprehension is the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obliged to talk about, and the difficulty of making them intelligible at one hearing.  But there two pieces, ‘zwei stuecke,’ as Kant would have said, in every philosophy—­the final outlook, belief, or attitude to which it brings us, and the reasonings by which that attitude is reached and mediated.  A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us, must indeed be true, but that is the least of its requirements.  One may be true without being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by revelation.  What distinguishes a philosopher’s truth is that it is reasoned.  Argument, not supposition, must have put it in his possession.  Common men find themselves inheriting their beliefs, they know not how.  They jump into them with both feet, and stand there.  Philosophers must do more; they must first get reason’s license for them; and to the professional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the license is usually a thing of much