Being
beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the
character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe,
is more than all theories about it put together. The most any theory
about it can do is to bring us to that. Certain it is that the acutest
theories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborate
education, are a {142} sheer mockery when, as too often happens, they
feed mean motives and a nerveless will. And it is equally certain that
a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with
learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should never
pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of human personality
lay there.

I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hope
you will agree that I have established my point, and that the
physiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but give
aid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind. Between agnosticism
and gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in
each. With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot
know how Being made itself or us. With gnosticism, it goes so far as
to insist that we can know Being's character when made, and how it asks
us to behave.

If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aim
and end of every sound philosophy I have curtailed the dignity and
scope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in this
ascertainment of the _character_ of Being lies an almost infinite
speculative task. Let the voluminous considerations by which all
modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan-psychic conclusions
speak for me. Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of a Renouvier,
reply whether within the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the
speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do.
But do it little or much, its _place_ in a philosophy is always the
same, and is set by the structural form of the mind. Philosophies,
whether expressed in sonnets or {143} systems, all must wear this form.
The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and
asks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and
makes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, and
communes with the eternal essences. But whatever his achievements and
discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some
new pra