our part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenth
century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they
want to think and do?--and I think the history of philosophy largely
bears him out, 'The aim of knowledge,' says Hegel,[2] 'is to divest
the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home
in it.' Different men find their minds more at home in very different
fragments of the world.

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