in
objective idealism comes from meeting the empirical demands made upon
actual thought. Idealism is much less formal than historic rationalism.
It treats thought, or reason, as constitutive of experience by means of
uniting and constructive functions, not as just concerned with a realm
of eternal truths apart from experience. On such a view thought
certainly loses its abstractness and remoteness. But, unfortunately, in
thus gaining the whole world it loses its own self. A world already, in
its intrinsic structure, dominated by thought is not a world in which,
save by contradiction of premises, thinking has anything to do.

That the doctrine logically results in making change unreal and error
unaccountable are consequences of importance in the technique of
professional philosophy; in the denial of empirical fact which they
imply they seem to many a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the premises from
which they proceed. But, after all, such consequences are of only
professional import. What is serious, even sinister, is the implied
sophistication regarding the place and office of reflection in the
scheme of things. A doctrine which exalts thought in name while
ignoring its efficacy in fact (that is, its use in bettering life) is a
doctrine which cannot be entertained and taught without serious peril.
Those who are not concerned with professional philosophy but who are
solicitous for intelligence as a factor in the amelioration of actual
conditions can but look askance at any doctrine which holds that the
entire scheme of things is already, if we but acquire the knack of
looking at it aright, fixedly and completely rational. It is a striking
manifestation of the extent in which philosophies have been compensatory
in quality.[5] But the matter cannot be passed over as if it were simply
a question of not grudging a certain amount of consolation to one amid
the irretrievable evils of life. For as to these evils no one knows how
many are retrievable; and a philosophy which proclaims the ability of a
dialectic theory of knowledge to reveal the world as already and
eternally a self-luminous rational whole, contaminates the scope and use
of thought at its very spring. To substitute the otiose insight gained
by manipulation of a formula for the slow cooeperative work of a humanity
guided by reflective intelligence is more than a technical blunder of
speculative philosophers.

A practical crisis may throw the relationship of ideas to lif