uch reasoning the Kantians and humanists reply that
these notions of an objective and eternal beauty, of a transcendent
and actual Cosmic Being exist within the mind. They are purely
subjective ideas, they are bounded by the inexorable circle of our
experience, hence they offer no proof of any objective reality which
may in greater or less degree correspond to them.

However, there must be a "source" of these ideas. To which the
philosophers reply, Yes, they are "primitive and necessary," produced
by reason only, without borrowing anything from the senses or the
understanding. Yet there is no sufficient evidence that the idea of
God is thus produced by any faculty of mind acting in entire freedom
from external influence. On the contrary, the idea appears to owe much
to the operation of external things upon the mind; it is not then the
wholly unaffected product of reason. It is a response no less than
an intuition. Like all knowledge a discovery, but the discovery of
something there which could be discovered, hence, in that sense, a
revelation.

It is not necessary, then, for men to meet their situation in the
cosmos by saying with Kant: We will act as though there were a God,
although we are always conscious that we have no real knowledge of
Him as an external being. In the light of the tragic circumstances of
humanity, this is demanding the impossible. No sane body of men will
ever get sufficient inspiration for life or find an adequate solution
for the problem of life by resting upon mere value judgments which
they propose, by an effort of will, to put in the place of genuine
reality judgments. Indeed, there is a truly scholastic naivete, a
sort of solemn and unconscious humor, in seriously proposing that
men should vitalize and consecrate their deepest purposes and most
difficult experiences by hypothesizing mere appearances and illusions.

Nor are we willing either to say with Santayana that all our sense of
the beauty of the world is merely pleasure objectified and that we can
infer no eternal Beauty from it. We are aware that there cannot be an
immediate knowledge of a reality distinct from ourselves, that all
our knowledge must be, in the nature of the case, an idea, a mental
representation, that we can never know the Thing Itself. But if we
believe, as we logically and reasonably may, that our subjective ideas
are formed under the influence of objects unknown but without us,
produced by stimuli, real, if not