ame 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
same one deep concern in its destinies. We crave alike to feel more
truly at home with it, and to contribute our mite to its amelioration.
It would be pitiful if small aesthetic discords were to keep honest
men asunder.

I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism. But
if you look behind the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not
find it matricidal. I am as good a son as any rationalist among you to
our common mother. What troubles me more than this misapprehension is
the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obliged
to talk about, and the difficulty of making them intelligible at one
hearing. But there two pieces, 'zwei stuecke,' as Kant would have said,
in every philosophy--the final outlook, belief, or attitude to which
it brings us, and the reasonings by which that attitude is reached and
mediated. A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us, must indeed
be true, but that is the least of its requirements. One may be true
without being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by revelation.
What distinguishes a philosopher's truth is that it is _reasoned_.
Argument, not supp