Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/723

Rh to religious problems. The form and order of the treatment depend upon the nature of these latter problems themselves, and are not such as a system of philosophy, expounded solely for its own sake, would be free to take. The religious problems have been chosen for the present study because they first drove the author to philosophy, and because they, of all human interests, deserve our best efforts and our utmost loyalty."

It seems, therefore, that our author was driven to philosophy by some sort of religious disquiet or perplexity. We gather from what follows that he had lost his faith, or was fearful of losing it, and went to philosophy for relief. What he found it is the office of the book to tell, but it is evidently something very different from that which had left him at first. He says: "As he has no present connection with any visible religious body, and no sort of desire for any such connection, he can not be expected to write an apology for a popular creed. This confession is made frankly, but not for the sake of provoking a quarrel, and with all due reverence for the faith of other men. If the fox who had lost his tail was foolish to be proud of his loss, he would have been yet more foolish to hide it by wearing a false tail, stolen mayhap from a dead fox. The full application of the moral of the fable to the present case is, moreover, willingly accepted. Not as the fox invited his friends to imitate his loss, would the present writer aim to make other men lose their faiths. Rather is it his aim not to arouse fruitless quarrels, but to come to some peaceful understanding with his fellows touching the ultimate meaning and value and foundation of this noteworthy custom, so widely prevalent among us, the custom of having a religion."

Nevertheless, the philosophy he sought seems to have answered the author's purpose, as it showed him that the skepticism he dreaded was not so bad a thing after all. Again he says: "As to the relation of this book to what is called modern doubt, it is a relation neither to blind obedience nor of unsympathetic rejection. The doctrine of philosophic idealism here propounded is not what in these days is popularly called agnosticism. Yet doubting everything is once for all a necessary element in the organism of philosophic reflection. What is here dwelt upon over and over again is, however, the consideration that the doubts of our time are not to be apologetically 'refuted,' in the old-fashioned sense, but that, taken just as they are, fully and cordially received, they are upon analysis found to contain and imply a positive and important religious creed, bearing both upon conduct and upon reality. Not to have once thoroughly accepted as necessary the great philosophic doubts and problems of our day, is simply not to have philosophized as a man of this age. But to have accepted these doubts without in time coming to accept the positive truth that is concealed in them, is to treat them as the innocent favorite of fortune in a fairy tale always at first treats his magic gift. It is something common and dingy, and he lays it carelessly away in his empty house, feeling poorer than ever. But see: handle it rightly, and the fairy gift fills your transfigured home with a wealth of gems and gold, and spreads for you a wondrous banquet. To the author has come the fancy that modern doubt may be some such fairy gift as this, and he would like to suggest to some reader what may possibly prove the right fashion of using the talisman."

More light is thrown upon the author's position by a passage from his introductory chapter, where he remarks: "The short and easy agnostic method is not enough you must supplement skepticism by philosophy; and when you do so, you will find yourself forced to accept, not indeed the old theology of your childhood, but something that satisfies oddly enough certain religious longings that, as skeptic, you had carefully tried to forget. Then you'll find yourself with what you may have to call a religious doctrine; and then you may have to state it as we are here going to do, not in an easy or fascinating way, such as the pure skeptic can so well follow, but at all events with some approach to a serious and sustained effort to consider hard questions from many sides. The skeptical method is not only a good but also a necessary beginning of religious philosophy. But we are bound to go deeper than mere superficial agnosticism."

From these quotations the reader will be able to form some tolerable conception