Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/152

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
136
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. XIV.

rality, and religion are, in the name of rational thinking as well as by an appeal to the practical interests of mankind, entitled to contribute to a theory of Reality. The artistic view of the world,—certainly in so far as it can be put into terms of thought, and even when it cannot be expressed in clear conceptions or definite formulas,—has ontological value. The same thing is true of the ethical views of the world. In spite of the restrictive and de- pressing influence of the conclusions of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant is compelled to admit and to defend this truth in the Critique of Practical Reason and in the Critique of Judgment. If the Ground for our value-judgments cannot be discovered by philosophy as somewhere located in the Being of the World, then it is not alone our art and our morality that lack ontological support; the structure which we call science is much undermined and badly shattered at the same time.

Emphatically true is a similar claim, when we come to consider the judgments of fact, of law, and of worth, together with the sentiments which they evoke and to which they appeal, as well as the courses of conduct which the will to live right in the sight of the Divine Being accepts and sustains. The conception of the Being of the World toward which the race, under the influence of its more definitively religious experience and through decades of centuries of blindly striving, blundering, and yet aspiring life, has been working its way, is the conception of a perfect ethical Spirit. The great problem of the philosophy of religion to-day is the reconciliation, in a way to commend itself to our total experience, of this conception with that of the Being of the World held to be true from the points of view taken by the particular sciences and by systematic philosophy. Here, too, our mission should be one of reconciliation, so as to satisfy the better the claims made by the totality of man's complex experience.

In a word, philosophy must face all the facts and laws of the particular sciences with an active intellect, a docile and undisturbed spirit, and a resolute will. At the same time it must feel, in the personality of those who cultivate it, those æsthetical, ethical, and religious sentiments which are the permanent but developing outfit, as it were, of humanity for its apprehension and