at work! See, in Great Britain, how the
dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the
ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday,
gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional
needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual
harmonies! These are but tackings to the common {129} port, to that
ultimate _Weltanschauung_ of maximum subjective as well as objective
richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate
wear the theistic form.

Here let me say one word about a remark we often hear coming from the
anti-theistic wing: It is base, it is vile, it is the lowest depth of
immorality, to allow department Number Three to interpose its demands,
and have any vote in the question of what is true and what is false;
the mind must be a passive, reactionless sheet of white paper, on which
reality will simply come and register its own philosophic definition,
as the pen registers the curve on the sheet of a chronograph. "Of all
the cants that are canted in this canting age" this has always seemed
to me the most wretched, especially when it comes from professed
psychologists. As if the mind could, consistently with its definition,
be a reactionless sheet at all! As if conception could possibly occur
except for a teleological purpose, except to show us the way from a
state of things our senses cognize to another state of things our will
desires! As if 'science' itself were anything else than such an end of
desire, and a most peculiar one at that! And as if the 'truths' of
bare physics in particular, which these sticklers for intellectual
purity contend to be the only uncontaminated form, were not as great an
alteration and falsification of the simply 'given' order of the world,
into an order conceived solely for the mind's convenience and delight,
as any theistic doctrine possibly can be!

Physics is but one chapter in the great jugglery which our conceiving
faculty is forever playing with {130} the order of being as it presents
itself to our reception. It transforms the unutterable dead level and
continuum of the 'given' world into an utterly unlike world of sharp
differences and hierarchic subordinations for no other reason than to
satisfy certain subjective passions we possess.[8]

And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sake
of the operation. At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance