Professor Ladd's work.[1] "The construction of a tenable and comforting philosophy is a work of good-will; it is a beneficent deed, a gift of blessing to humanity." And the dedication: "To those who have the faith of reason in its strivings to know the deeper truth of things."
Now I would not be understood as not sharing in the faith of reason or in the longing for the existential judgment. But at present it interests me to stand aside and view the varied spectacle of philosophical effort. Experience itself in its diversity, the description of experience, and the explanation of experience, help to make up that spectacle. Even he who enters eagerly into the work of description or explanation can but observe the situation before him and report what he can see. If he does more, he mutilates the facts which he has undertaken to describe in their integrity. And there is much to suggest that the philosopher is not the mere spectator nearly so often as he should be.
It is sometimes said that the function of idealism is to make men feel at home in the world. Some lines of Professor Seth are such an apt testimony on this point that I can not resist quoting them: "Metaphysically, idealism is opposed most ordinarily to materialism; in the widest sense it is the opposite of what may be called the mechanical and atheistic view of the universe, whatever special form that may take. Is self-conscious thought with its ideal ends,—the True, the Beautiful, the Good,—the self-realizing End that works in changes and makes it evolution? or are these but the casual outcome of a mechanical system?—a system in its ultimate essence indifferent to the results which in its gyrations it has unwittingly created, and will as unwittingly destroy? Is thought or matter the prius? Is the ultimate essence and cause of all things only 'dust that rises up and is lightly laid again,' or is it the Eternal Love of Dante's Vision,—'the love that moves the sun and the other stars'? That is the fundamental metaphysical antithesis. If we embrace the one alternative, however we may clothe it in detail, we recognize the universe as our home, and we may have a religion; if we embrace the other, then the spirit of man is indeed homeless in an alien world."[2]
We have here, I think, a sufficient explanation of the longing for the existential judgment. The existential judgment is needed to deproblematize the situation. Of course the emotional need is not always stated quite so frankly, but it frequently appears in a philosophy as its efficient cause. The philosophy of Spinoza is as clearly an adjustment to the emotional values of his world as were the deeds of Saint
