Of course philosophy, as thus far described, is sure to begin at once, if it can, with inquiries into the largest and most significant instincts, the deepest faiths of humanity. These, when it discovers them, it will single out and criticise. Hence, indeed, the philosophers are always talking of such problems as duty and God. Hence they inquire how we can come to know whether there is any external world at all, and, if so, whether this world is to be treated as dead matter, or as live mind. Hence they are curious to study our ideas of natural law, of moral freedom, of time, of space, of causation, of self. They pry into the concerns of faith as if these were theirs by divine right. They are not only prying, they are on one side of their activity merciless, skeptical, paradoxical, inconsiderate. They don’t ask, it would seem, how dear your faith is to you; they analyze it, as they would the reflex action of a starfish, or the behavior of a pigeon; and then they try to estimate faith objectively, as an editor looks critically at a love-sonnet which somebody has sent him (a sonnet written with the author’s heart’s blood), and weighs it coolly and cruelly before he will consent to find it available. Even so the philosopher has his standard of the availability of human faiths. You have to satisfy this with your creed before he will approve you. All this sometimes seems cynical, just as the editor’s coolness may become provoking. But then, as you know, the editor, with all his apparent cruelty, is a man of sympathy and of more than negative aims. He has to consider what he calls availability, because he has his critical public to please. And the philosopher — he, too, has to be critical and to seem cruel, because he also has a public to please with his estimate; and his chosen public ought to be no less than the absolute judge, the world spirit himself, in whose eyes the philosopher can find favor only if he be able to sift the truth from the error. That is why he is rigid. Nothing but an absolute critical standard ought to satisfy
