f only men can keep their minds
freed from formalism, idol worship, fixed ideas, and exalted
abstractions, politicians need not worry about the language in which the
end of our striving is expressed. For with the removal of distracting
idols, man's experience becomes the center of thought. And if we think in
terms of men, find out what really bothers them, seek to supply what they
really want, hold only their experience sacred, we shall find our
sanction obvious and unchallenged.

CHAPTER VII

THE MAKING OF CREEDS

My first course in philosophy was nothing less than a summary of the
important systems of thought put forward in Western Europe during the
last twenty-six hundred years. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration--we
did gloss over a few centuries in the Middle Ages. For the rest we
touched upon all the historic names from Thales to Nietzsche. After about
nine weeks of this bewildering transit a friend approached me with a sour
look on his face. "You know," he said, "I can't make head or tail out of
this business. I agree with each philosopher as we study him. But when we
get to the next one, I agree with him too. Yet he generally says the
other one was wrong. They can't all be right. Can they now?" I was too
much puzzled with the same difficulty to help him.

Somewhat later I began to read the history of political theories. It was
a less disinterested study than those sophomore speculations, for I had
jumped into a profession which carried me through some of the underground
passages of "practical politics" and reformist groups. The tangle of
motives and facts and ideas was incredible. I began to feel the force of
Mr. John Hobson's remark that "if practical workers for social and
industrial reforms continue to ignore principles ... they will have to
pay the price which short-sighted empiricism always pays; with slow,
hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable false starts and
backslidings, they will move in the dark along an unseen track toward an
unseen goal." The political theorists laid some claim to lighting up both
the track and the goal, and so I turned to them for help.

Now whoever has followed political theory will have derived perhaps two
convictions as a reward. Almost all the thinkers seem to regard their
systems as true and binding, and none of these systems are. No matter
which one you examine, it is inadequate. You cannot be a Platonist or a
Benthamite in politics to-day. You cann