n cultivation or neglect of the rationalistic
habit. A man of science or of critical research may be dull to new
refinements of aesthesis where an unscientific emotionalist _may_ be
sensitive to them.

Recognising all this, the balanced rationalist will shun as a special
sin of religion the ritualising of his joys, the sectarian extension of
his differences of credence to the field of aesthetics. His rationalism
as such implies no one of the special 'isms' of the arts; though there
he may be an 'ist' like another. For him all art, all literature, all
beauty, is so much of Nature's fruitage; and Christian cathedral and
Moslem mosque can yield him pleasures which Christian and Moslem can
never derive from _his_ distinctive intellectual work. He may even take
artistic satisfaction in contemplating the figure of the winged angel
which Christianity took over from Paganism, without believing it to be
the image of a reality, as so many pietists have so childishly done for
thousands of years. 'Religious' music can minister to him in virtue of
the common psychosis. His very names for himself and his intellectual
code are but insistences on complete inner loyalty to a moral law which
most men profess to obey, and which all of necessity obey in many if not
in most matters.

The time is for him even in sight, as it were, when most men will
recognise and live by that law; and when that day comes there will be no
more need to profess rationalism than to profess, as a creed, any of the
daily reciprocities by which society subsists. But till that day comes
he marks himself, and is marked--to his frequent discomfort, it may
be--by his insistence, in the deepest matters, on that law of truth
which so many still persistently subordinate to pleas or preferences of
authority or habit, convention or subjective taste. Avowing it as his
bias, if so challenged, he claims that it is the bias to perfection in
the intellectual life as the bias to order and sympathy is the bias to
perfection in the civil.

FOOTNOTE:

[13] See Professor James's _Principles of Psychology_, 1891, ii. 321.

Sec. 8. ULTIMATE PROBLEMS

To a surprising degree, the philosophic disputes of the ages turn upon
the same problems; and to an extent that is nothing short of sinister,
they resolve themselves for most of the onlookers, if not of the
participants, into the question of the maintenance of the popular
religion. Thus academic theists in our own day are fo