Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/261

236 popular realistic philosophy, with its crudely metaphysical notion of things, we shall be ready to listen to skepticism about the foundations of this notion; and we shall be ready for some new conception. This new conception will indeed not falsify the true moral meaning of that innocent faith in a real world upon which we have so far depended in our research. The popular notion of an external world, practically useful for many purposes, and sufficient for many scientific ends, will be refuted and rejected in its contradictions and in its absurdities, but the soul of truth that is in it will be absorbed into a higher conception both of the eternal Reality and of our relation thereto. Our seeming loss will become our gain. That bad dream, the dead and worthless World of Doubt in which most of our modern teachers remain stuck fast, will be transformed for us. We shall see that the truth of it is a higher World, of glorious religious significance.

So for the first we turn to that supposed world of popular metaphysics, to test its religious value. It is conceived as a world existent in space and time, and as a world of real things which act and interact. For convenience sake, we shall in the following use the word Power to mean any one of these things, or any group of them, that in this external world may be supposed to produce effects upon any other thing or group of things. However these Powers get their efficiency, the religious significance of the supposed external world, if it has any, must lie in the supremacy of the Good in this world of the Powers. One must then view this external world historically as a mass