adically alien corner, but an all-pervading _intimacy_.
Now, in certain sensitively egotistic minds this conception of reality
is sure to put on a narrow, close, sick-room air. Everything
sentimental and priggish will be consecrated by it. That element in
reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there
because it calls forth {90} powers that he owns--the rough, harsh,
sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the
democratizer--is banished because it jars too much on the desire for
communion. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws
many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic
reaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly
constituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to
escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no
respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over
us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think,
always be seen in philosophy. Some men will keep insisting on the
reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we
can act _with_; others, on the opacity of brute fact that we must react
_against_.

Now, there is one element of our active nature which the Christian
religion has emphatically recognized, but which philosophers as a rule
have with great insincerity tried to huddle out of sight in their
pretension to found systems of absolute certainty. I mean the element
of faith. Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is
still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness
to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the
prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is in
fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs;
and there will be a very widespread tendency in men of vigorous nature
to enjoy a certain amount of uncertainty in their philosophic creed,
just as risk lends a zest to worldly activity. Absolutely certified
philosophies {91} seeking the _inconcussum_ are fruits of mental
natures in which the passion for identity (which we saw to be but one
factor of the rational appetite) plays an abnormally exclusive part.
In the average man, on the contrary, the power to trust, to risk a
little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function. Any mode
of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this