ived at the _cul de sac_. In fact, if idealism is a living
philosophy, it is nevertheless showing signs of age and decay. Ptolemaic
astronomy, as an explanation of planetary movements, proved its
exhaustion by a liberal recourse to epicycles as the answer to all
awkward objections; and philosophies show themselves moribund in an
analogous way, by a monotonous pressing of some one hackneyed principle
to a degree that makes common-sense revolt and fling the whole theory to
the winds--chaff and grain indiscriminately. But philosophy must be
distinguished from philosophies, as religion from religions. The
imperfection of the various concrete attempts to satisfy either
spiritual need, may make the desperate-minded wish to cut themselves
free from all connection with any particular system; but the desire and
effort to have a knowledge of the whole (_i.e._, a philosophy) is as
natural and ineradicable as the desire to live and breathe. In this
general sense, philosophy "takes human experience, sets it out in all
its main elements, and then endeavours to form a plan of systematic
thought which will account for the whole. It has one fundamental
postulate, that there is a meaning, or, in other words, that there is an
all-pervading unity." This "faith" in the ultimate coherence and unity
of everything is the presupposition and motive of the very attempt to
philosophize or to determine the nature of that unity. It is not,
therefore, itself a product of philosophy; it is an innate conviction
that can be denied only from the teeth outwards, but can neither be
proved nor disproved by the finite mind.

To "explain" is in one way or another to liken the less known to what is
better known; and thus every philosophy is an attempt to express--by
means of sundry extensions and limitations--the universe of our
experience in the terms of some totality with which we are more
familiar; plainly, it is also an endeavour to express the greater in
terms of the less, and must therefore be almost infinitely inadequate
even at the best. At one time the Whole has been conceived as the unity
of a mere aggregate--of a heap of stones; at another, as a mere
sand-storm of fortuitous atoms; there has been the egg-theory, and the
tortoise-theory, and many others, no less grotesque to our seeming. But,
leaving fanciful and poetical philosophies aside, and considering only
those which pretend to be strictly rational, we find the objective
philosophy and the sub