ntly desiderated
traits of a perfect universe, are in fact the limits of what adequacy
environmental satisfactions can attain, ideas hypostatized, normative of
existence, but not constituting it. With them, in philosophy and
religion, the mind confronts the experiences of death and obstruction,
of manifoldness, change and materiality, and denies them, as Peter
denied Jesus. The visible world, being not as we want it, we imagine an
unseen one that satisfies our want, declaring the visible one an
illusion by its side. So we work a radical substitution of desiderates
for actualities, of ideals for facts, of values for existences. Art
alone acknowledges the actual relations between these contrasting pairs.
Art alone so operates as in fact to convert their oppugnance into
identity. Intrinsically, its whole purpose and technique consists of
transmutation of values into existences, in the incarnation the
realization of values. The philosophy and religion of tradition, on the
contrary, consists intrinsically in the flat denial of reality, or at
least, co-reality, to existence, and the transfer of that eulogium to
value-forms as such.

Metaphysics, theology, ethics, logic, aesthetics, dialectic developments
as they are of "norms" or "realities" which themselves can have no
meaning without the "apparent," changing world they measure and belie,
assume consequently a detachment and self-sufficiency they do not
actually possess. Their historians have treated them as if they had no
context, as if the elaboration of the ideal tendencies of the successive
systems explained their origin, character, and significance. But in fact
they are unendowed with this pure intrinsicality, and their development
is not to be accounted for as exteriorization of innate motive or an
unfoldment of inward implications. They have a context; they are crossed
and interpenetrated by outer interests and extraneous considerations.
Their meaning, in so far as it is not merely aesthetic, is _nil_ apart
from these interests and considerations of which they are sometimes
expressions, sometimes reconstructions, and from which they are
persistently refuges.

Philosophy and religion are, in a word, no less than art, social facts.
They are responses to group situations without which they cannot be
understood. Although analysis has shown them to be rooted in certain
persistent motives and conditions of human nature by whose virtue they
issue in definite contours and s