You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific
loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit
of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old
confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of
the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your
dilemma: you find the two parts of your quaesitum hopelessly
separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or
else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself
religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete
facts and joys and sorrows.

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.