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228 lions of devoted servants, the humanity of the future may possibly (we do not, at least at this point in our study, know that it will certainly) be led to a grand success. This far-off divine event to which, for all we know, our fragment of creation may be moving, but which at any rate we regard with longing and delight, constitutes the moral aim of our philosophic studies. It is good to strive.

In the present chapter, therefore, we shall devote ourselves for the most part to negative criticism of certain views that are or may be held about the real world.

That skepticism in studying reality is to some extent useful, most people will admit. But not every one will follow us at once into the thorough-going and uncompromising skepticism that we shall have to present in the following as the very basis of our positive doctrine. It is surprising how easily the philosophic need is satisfied in the minds of most persons, even in the minds of many professed philosophic students. A few very complacent questions, readily if unintelligibly answered, put to rest the whole desire that such people feel to cross-examine reason. In fact they seem to hold that a certain disrespect would be shown by questioning reason any more sharply; and so their philosophy is like a Congressional investigation of the doings of a politician, conducted by his fellow-partisans. But we feel, in writing this book, that such a philosophy, whose only business it is to “whitewash” reason, is an in-