Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/142

126 any methods or sources of experiencing that promise to throw light on its business, be they intellectual, artistic or religious intuitions, but it will not accept any one of them without criticism, any more than it will accept ordinary sense-experience offhand.

And, so far as I can see, no new school of philosophy attempts to force its intuitions or wills to believe upon us without giving reasons for our accepting these methods of knowledge rather than others: the only question is whether or not the reasons are adequate. There is always some more or less rational theory behind the view that pure experience, or immediate experience, or intellectual intuition, or sympathetic artistic feeling, or moral or religious faith, gives us the clearest and truest insight into reality. Blind faith in witches and demons is not accepted on its own testimony by those in whom the will to know is strong, and no alleged experience is going to pass unchallenged that cannot give an account of itself.

The inner experiences emphasized and variously named by Fichte, Schelling, Bergson, and countless others, the inner psychic life of man himself, cannot be cast aside or reduced to mere appearance unless there is ample cognitive warrant for so doing. The protests of the new movements against the mechanization of life and mind may be justified, but they are not protests against intelligence and rationalism; rationalism itself has pro- tested against a static and mechanical view in the persons of a long line of illustrious thinkers ever since the days of Plato. And the protests of the reformers against a spiritual block-universe, against the atomic conception of mental life or the idea of a teleological despotism ruled by an arch-purpose, may be justified, but it is not a valid protest against rationalism, which is in no wise compelled to look at mental life in such a wooden way. Rationalism is committed to nothing but the business of under- standing experience, of putting questions to it, not such as any fool may ask but only such as a wise man can answer.

It is true, reason can operate only in a rational world, in a world in which there is likeness besides difference, unity besides plurality, permanence besides change. It does not demand a