Orthodox Rationalism [pp. 294-312]

OR TlOD OX RA TIONA LISM.
phy equal to the methods of true scientific knowledge. It is
rationalistic, and not scientific, psychology to set up a part or
function of self-conscious life as the master-power and judge
of the whole; to substitute the faculty of reason for man learn ing by all his experience what he should do and believe. Truth
must be something more than the mere relation of ideas to our
powers of cognition; truth can be known best and most fully
through a perfect life.
On account of a too exclusive analytic method our current
mental science fails to render any satisfactory explanation of
the origin and vital necessity of the first truths of the reason, or
the real development of man's great spiritual faiths. The usual
intuitional philosophy begins rather with the mind as a readymade construction. The starting-point of its inquiries is the
natural constitution of the mind. The native elements of consciousness analysis cannot break up into simpler ideas. These
are the elements of mental chemistry which we should accept as
we find them, and use with logical consistency in constructing
our systems of thought. This philosophy is certainly clear and
satisfactory so far as it goes, and upon its foundations theology
has usually been satisfied to build. But now the very foundations are questioned. When theology entrusts man's spiritual
faiths to this constitutional philosophy of human nature, it fails
to protect them from the approaches of a science to which no
constitutions are sacred, no existing products elementary, and
which is determined to follow every idea and belief as well as
every present form or species in nature back as far as it possibly
can down the age-long course of development towards the unknown Power from which all things have proceeded. Herbert
Spencer can be fairly and fully met only by a spiritual philosophy which shall be able to follow him step by step along the
processes through which man has at last come to himself as a
moral and rational being, and to show at every stage of this
evolution of the creation the presence and power of something
which is more than the natural-of something spiritual and
divine in human nature. We may not, it is true, carry the
analysis of moral ideas and intuitions any farther than the intuitional philosophy usually does; but we cannot stop content with
mere mental or logical "criteria of truth;" we must justify the
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