d just in the degree in which the elements
in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the
continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may know
what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time. Had pure
experience, the naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy, there
would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing
any of its terms. We should just have experienced inarticulately and
unintellectually enjoyed. This leaning on 'reaction' in the naturalist
account implies that, whenever we intellectualize a relatively pure
experience, we ought to do so for the sake of redescending to the
purer or more concrete level again; and that if an intellect stays
aloft among its abstract terms and generalized relations, and does not
reinsert itself with its conclusions into some particular point of
the immediate stream of life, it fails to finish out its function and
leaves its normal race unrun.

Most rationalists nowadays will agree that naturalism gives a true
enough account of the way in which our intellect arose at first, but
they will deny these latter implications. The case, they will say,
resembles that of sexual love. Originating in the animal need
of getting another generation born, this passion has developed
secondarily such imperious spiritual needs that, if you ask why
another generation ought to be born at all, the answer is: 'Chiefly
that love may go on.' Just so with our intellect: it originated as a
practical means of serving life; but it has developed incidentally the
function of understanding absolute truth; and life itself now seems to
be given chiefly as a means by which that function may be prosecuted.
But truth and the understanding of it lie among the abstracts and
universals, so the intellect now carries on its higher business wholly
in this region, without any need of redescending into pure experience
again.

If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalistic
and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader, perhaps an example
will make them more concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an
ultra-rationalist. He admits that our intellect is primarily
practical, but says that, for philosophers, the practical need is
simply Truth.[1] Truth, moreover, must be assumed 'consistent.'
Immediate experience has to be broken into subjects and qualities,
terms and relations, to be understood as truth at all. Yet when
so broken it