Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/147

No. 2.]

Our conclusion then would be this: If anyone finds grounds for supposing that the object of rationalism is to deduce a world from a priori principles, to construct an absolute system independently of experience, his hostility to it is fully justified. The aim of all thinking is to interpret experience as we find it, not to spin it out of an a priori principle. We are in search of theories, and, if the thing is possible, of a universal theory that will help us to understand what is; and such theories must be laid on the foundations of experience; they cannot hang in mid-air. And though the mind longs for certainty and has for its ideal a system of interrelated judgments, present-day rationalism cannot and does not lay claim to the possession of complete truth. Again, human thinking has its ways or habits, and rationalism is right in recognizing such habits or categories of thought. But they are not mere arbitrary forms and they do not falsify the real. It is natural to suppose that a mind that has grown up in the world should have caught something of its spirit; it is hard to see how a mind could have formed habits in a world that has no habits, or how a mind could live in an environment that knows no law and yet conceive it as obedient to law. If to categorize the world is to falsify it, we are confronted with the double miracle of a sane mind being born in bedlam and remaining sane in bedlam.

Moreover, if rationalism is taken to mean the degradation of the seeming diversity of experience to mere illusion and the absolute domination of concrete particulars by an abstraction, call it matter, energy, spirit, or God, the protests of pluralism are just. Unity without plurality is death, as plurality without unity is chaos. Indeed, thinking itself would be as absolutely dumb in the presence of absolute monotony as in the presence of absolute chaos. And so would sense-perception and feeling and intuition. Rationalism does not compel us to reduce all processes to a single principle; a world of differences, oppositions, changes is not an irrational world. It is true that knowledge would be impossible in a world in which there are no unities and uniformities, but it is just as true that it would be impossible in a world in which there is neither difference nor change. Rationalism does not prescribe the goal and path of science