It is not necessary, then, for men to meet their situation in the cosmos by saying with Kant:  We will act as though there were a God, although we are always conscious that we have no real knowledge of Him as an external being.  In the light of the tragic circumstances of humanity, this is demanding the impossible.  No sane body of men will ever get sufficient inspiration for life or find an adequate solution for the problem of life by resting upon mere value judgments which they propose, by an effort of will, to put in the place of genuine reality judgments.  Indeed, there is a truly scholastic naivete, a sort of solemn and unconscious humor, in seriously proposing that men should vitalize and consecrate their deepest purposes and most difficult experiences by hypothesizing mere appearances and illusions.

Nor are we willing either to say with Santayana that all our sense of the beauty of the world is merely pleasure objectified and that we can infer no eternal Beauty from it.  We are aware that there cannot be an immediate knowledge of a reality distinct from ourselves, that all our knowledge must be, in the nature of the case, an idea, a mental representation, that we can never know the Thing Itself.  But if we believe, as we logically and reasonably may, that our subjective ideas are formed under the influence of objects unknown but without us, produced by stimuli, real, if not perceived apart from our own consciousness, then we may say that what we have is a mediate or representative knowledge not only of an Eternal Being but formed under the influence of that Being.  Nor does the believer ask for more.  He does not expect to see the King in His beauty; he only needs to know that He is, that He is there.

How self-verifying and moving, then, are the appeals ready to our hands.  As long as man with the power to question, to strive, to aspire, to endure, to suffer, lives in a universe of ruthless and overwhelming might, so long, if he is to understand it or maintain his reason and his dignity, he will believe it to be controlled by a Spirit beyond no less than within, from whom his spirit is derived.  It is out of the struggle to revere and conserve human personality, out of the belief in the indefectible worth and honor of selfhood that our race has fronted a universe in arms, and pitting its soul against nature has cried, “God is my refuge:  underneath me, at the very moment when I am engulfed in earthquake shock or shattered in the battle’s roar, there are everlasting arms!” There is something which is too deep for tears in the unconquerable idealism, the utter magnanimity of the faith of the human spirit in that which will answer to itself, as evidenced in this forlorn and glorious adventure of the soul.  Sometimes we are constrained to ask ourselves, How can the heart of man go so undismayed through the waste places of the world?