Philosophy and Specific Problems [pp. 208-232]

PHILOSOPHY A4D ITS SPECIHIC PROBLEMS.
reference to' the other beliefs of empirical or intuitional empiricism above noted. All of these beliefs illumine and explain each
other in the whole and undivided experience of mnan, which,
when philosophically comprehended, is seen to constitute a selfsufficient organism, not of mysterious persuasion or of doubt,
but of knowledge. Arbitrarily to cut off, in theory, from experience its larger and fundamentally important half, and then
to pronounce mysterious and inscrutable those convictions at
once elementary and universal which still rise in man's consciousness from this half, which has only been suppressed in
theory, but cannot be wholly abstracted from in reality, and
then finally to make "philosophy" or "metaphysics" to consist
in the attempt to furnish a quasi-theoretical, or at least a practical, justification of human conduct in still clinging to some or
all of them-this is the most absolute piece of nonsense in
which human intellect has ever seriously indulged. It is the
worst sort of abstraction, for it mutilates man, tearing the
organic whole of his living experience into miserable shreds.
And it is no wonder that to the mass of mankind "the words of
the metaphysicians" who are guilty of it
"Are unrefreshing as the mist and wind
That through the withered leaves of autumn whistle."
The words of the great philosophers, the real "maestri di
color, che sanno," have been a "power to uplift" man and the:
world of which he is an organic member, simply because, founded
on patient and reverent examination of the whole experience
of man, they were in extraordinary measure a power to reveal
to man both himself and his universe in their true nature, and
not because they were concerned with the quibbling question
as to whether man and the world really existed, as inscrutable
things-in-themselves, apart from individual conscious states.
And this will continue to be the secret of their influence in the
future. It is this that may enable us to predict with perfect
certainty that, for example, the Platonic-Aristotelian theory of
ideal, spiritual reality will be hereafter, as it has been in the past,
a power to mould and sustain civilization-i.e. the organized intelligence of mankind as expressing itself in religion, art, the.
2I5