ut
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.
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 is less consistent
than ever. Taken raw, it is all un-distinguished. Intellectualized, it
is all distinction without oneness. 'Such an arrangement may _work_, but
the theoretic problem is not solved.' The question is '_how_ the
diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness.' To go back to pure
experience is unavailing. 'Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle.'
Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an _understanding_. 'It is a
mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view.' The experience
offered as facts or truths 'I find that my intellect rejects because
they contradict themselves. They offer a complex of diversities
conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and which it can not
repeat as its own.... For to be satisfied, my intellect must understand,
and it can not understand by taking a congeries in the lump.'[44] So Mr.
Bradley, in the sole interests of 'understanding' (as he conceives that
function), turns his back on finite experience forever. Truth must lie
in the opposite direction, the direction of the Absolute; and this kind
of rationalism and naturalism, or