st. The will, which is illegitimately
stretched to include feeling,[80] is treated as the creator as well as
the discerner of reality. The 'world of appearance' is plastic in its
grasp. It is this metaphysical pragmatism which is really serviceable to
Modernism. If the categories of the understanding can be so disparaged
as to be allowed no independent truth, value, or importance, all
collisions between faith and fact may be avoided by discrediting in
advance any conclusions at which science may arrive. Assertions about
'brute fact' which are scientifically false may thus not be untrue when
taken out of the scientific plane, because outside that plane they are
harmless word-pictures, soap-bubbles blown off by the poetical
creativeness of faith Any assertion about fact which commends itself to
the will and affections and which is proved by experience to furnish
nutriment to the spiritual life, may be adhered to without scruple. It
is not only useful, but true, in the only sense in which truth can be
predicated of anything in the higher sphere.

The obvious criticism on this notion of religious truth as purely moral
and practical is that it is itself abstract and one-sided. The universe
as it appears to discursive thought, with its vast system of seemingly
uniform laws, which operate without much consideration for our wishes or
feelings, must be at least an image of the real universe. We cannot
accept the irreconcilable dualism between the will-world and the world
of phenomena which the philosophical Modernists assume. The dualism, or
rather the contradiction, is not in the nature of things, nor in the
constitution of our minds, but in the consciousness of the unhappy men
who are trying to combine two wholly incompatible theories. On the
critical side they are pure rationalists, much as they dislike the name.
They claim, as we have seen, to have advanced to philosophy through
criticism. But the Modernist critics start with very well-defined
presuppositions. They ridicule the notion that 'God is a personage in
history'; they assume that for the historian 'He cannot be found
anywhere'; that He is as though He did not exist. On the strength of
this presupposition, and for no other reason, they proceed to rule out,
without further investigation, all alleged instances of divine
intervention in history. Unhampered by any of the misgivings which
predispose the ordinary believer to conservatism, they follow the
rationalist argume