Excerpt from Some Religious Implications of Pragmatism

Two things there are, said Kant, which are worthy of man's rever ence, the starry heavens above and the moral law within. This out burst Of scientific enthusiasm and moral fervor may be fairly said to epitomize the spirit and the motif of modern philosophy. Whenever and wherever our modern life has presented its problems or vouchsafed its satisfactions one or the other, or both, of these interests have been implicated. And philosophic thought has taken its cues accordingly. Not every thinker has been as catholic in his interests as was Kant. T 0 some the starry heavens above have seemed all-important, while to others the moral law within has made the strongest appeal. But few thinkers, no matter how great their bias in one direction, have been insensible to the problems lying in the other direction. And the pro foundest systems Of philosophy have come from those men who, like Kant, have been concerned with both the natural and the spiritual, the real and the ideal, the is and the ought, have felt these to be incom patible and have sought to penetrate to some deeper principle of unity.

This more fundamental principle of unity, however, has not been forthcoming. Spinoza's God or Nature, Kant's Thing in Itself, Hegel's Absolute, and Spencer's Unknowable - all are but grim testimonies of the persistence of the problem. It is as urgent today as it was in an earlier and more metaphysical age. To be sure, we have become suspicious of the possibility or the worth of ultimate principles and impatient with any philosophy which attempts to formulate such principles. With the development of scientific methods, our practical problems have so multiplied and our immediate experience has become SO engaging as to leave us little time or inclination for the consideration of problems of a more strictly philosophic character. Furthermore, as knowledge has become more and more specialized, a sort of division of labor has served to isolate the various fields of human interests and activities, and to Obscure the fact Of their connections. But, while this specialization of knowledge has its advantages, it likewise has its dangers. The quality Of the work done by the particular sciences is apt to be impaired by too rigid an isolation of their respective fields. Life itself is not made up of clearly marked Ofi fields of interest and activities.

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