ot simply alive to this or that physical or psychic need, nor
even to the practical interest and advantage of this or that Art,
Science, Sociology, Politics, Ethics; but when he awakens further to the
question as to why and how these several activities, all so costly where
at all effectual, can deserve all this sacrifice--can be based in
anything sufficiently abiding and objective. The history of all the past
efforts, and indeed all really adequate richness of immediate outlook,
combine, I think, to answer that only the experience and the conviction
of an Objective Reality distinct from, and more than, man, or indeed
than the whole of the world apprehended by man as less than, or as equal
to, man himself, can furnish sufficiently deep and tenacious roots for
our sense and need of an objective supreme Beauty, Truth, and
Goodness--of a living Reality already overflowing that which, in lesser
degrees and ways, we small realities cannot altogether cease from
desiring to become. It is Religion which, from first to last, but with
increasing purity and power, brings with it this evidence and
conviction. Its sense of the Objective, Full Reality of God, and its
need of Adoration are quite essential to Religion, although considerable
systems, which are largely satisfactory in the more immediate questions
raised by Aesthetics and even by Ethics, and which are sincerely anxious
to do justice also to the religious sense, are fully at work to explain
away these essential characteristics of all wideawake Religion. Paul
Natorp, the distinguished Plato-scholar in Germany, the short-lived
pathetically eloquent M. Guyau in France, and, above all, Benedetto
Croce, the large encyclopaedic mind in Italy, have influenced or led
much of this movement, which, in questions of Religion, has assuredly
not reached the deepest and most tenacious teachings of life.

The intimations as to this deepest Reality certainly arise within my own
mind, emotion, will; and these my faculties cannot, upon the whole, be
constrained by my fellow mortals; indeed, as men grow more manysidedly
awake, all attempts at any such constraint only arrest or deflect the
growth of these intimations. Yet the dispositions necessary for the
sufficient apprehension of these religious intimations--sincerity,
conscientiousness, docility--are not, even collectively, already
Religion, any more than they are Science or Philosophy. With these
dispositions on our part, objective facts an