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.  This young man, who was a graduate of some Western college, began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic class-room you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street.  The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time.  The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed.  The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble.  The contradictions of real life are absent from it.  Its architecture is classic.  Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts.  Purity and dignity are what it most expresses.  It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.

In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present.  It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.

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.  Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly written ‘Theodicee’ of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds.  Let me quote a specimen of what I mean.