Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/178



conception of Reality is one which philosophical writers of all schools and tendencies must face and consider. In the present day, when popular philosophy is largely under the influence of more or less decidedly agnostic traditions, it is customary to make light of attempts to say anything positive about the Absolute; but it is all the more popular to say: “Oh, we modern men, discarding the fantasies of the past, rejecting a priori constructions, trusting solely to experience, — we seek, in our philosophy, for the Real.” “And the Real,” one continues, “is not something that metaphysical dreaming can make out. It is something forced upon us by the irresistible compulsion of experience. We know regarding it, not its ultimate structure, but its appearances in our individual experience. Ultimate truth is a dream of the philosophers.”

In the argument with which this debate opened, I attempted some dealing with just such relatively