To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in space, with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot upon.  It is a set of stars hurled into heaven without even a centre of gravity to pull against.  In other spheres of life it is true that we have got used to living in a state of relative insecurity.  The authority of ‘the State,’ and that of an absolute ‘moral law,’ have resolved themselves into expediencies, and holy church has resolved itself into ‘meeting-houses.’  Not so as yet within the philosophic class-rooms.  A universe with such as us contributing to create its truth, a world delivered to our opportunisms and our private judgments!  Home-rule for Ireland would be a millennium in comparison.  We’re no more fit for such a part than the Filipinos are ‘fit for self-government.’  Such a world would not be respectable, philosophically.  It is a trunk without a tag, a dog without a collar, in the eyes of most professors of philosophy.

What then would tighten this loose universe, according to the professors?

Something to support the finite many, to tie it to, to unify and anchor it.  Something unexposed to accident, something eternal and unalterable.  The mutable in experience must be founded on immutability.  Behind our de facto world, our world in act, there must be a de jure duplicate fixed and previous, with all that can happen here already there in posse, every drop of blood, every smallest item, appointed and provided, stamped and branded, without chance of variation.  The negatives that haunt our ideals here below must be themselves negated in the absolutely Real.  This alone makes the universe solid.  This is the resting deep.  We live upon the stormy surface; but with this our anchor holds, for it grapples rocky bottom.  This is Wordsworth’s “central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.”  This is Vivekananda’s mystical One of which I read to you.  This is Reality with the big R, reality that makes the timeless claim, reality to which defeat can’t happen.  This is what the men of principles, and in general all the men whom I called tender-minded in my first lecture, think themselves obliged to postulate.

And this, exactly this, is what the tough-minded of that lecture find themselves moved to call a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.  The tough-minded are the men whose alpha and omega are facts.  Behind the bare phenomenal facts, as my tough-minded old friend Chauncey Wright, the great Harvard empiricist of my youth, used to say, there is nothing.  When a rationalist insists that behind the facts there is the ground of the facts, the possibility of the facts, the tougher empiricists accuse him of taking the mere name and nature of a fact and clapping it behind the fact as a duplicate entity to make it possible.  That such sham grounds are often invoked is notorious.  At a surgical operation I heard