ntaining alone through relevance to
its ground and conditions, the control which this relevance yields makes
it so infectious that it tends to permeate every human institution, even
religion and philosophy. Philosophy, it is true, has lagged behind even
religion in relevancy, but the lagging has been due not to the
intention of the philosopher but to the inherent character of the task
he assumed. Both art and religion, we have seen, possess an immediacy
and concreteness which philosophy lacks. Art reconstructs correlative
portions of the environment for the eye, the ear, the hopes and fears of
the daily life. Religion extends this reconstruction beyond the actual
environment, but applies its saving technique at the critical points in
the career of the group or the individual; to control the food-supply,
to protect in birth, pubescence, marriage, and death. All its motives
are grounded in specific instincts and needs, all its reconstructions
and compensations culminate with reference to these. Philosophy, on the
other hand, deals with the _whole_ nature of man and his _whole_
environment. It seeks primaries and ultimates. Its traditional task is
so to define the universe as to articulate thereby a theory of life and
eternal salvation. It establishes contact with reality at no individual,
specific point: its reals are "real in general." It aims, in a word, to
be relevant to all nature, and to express the whole soul of man. The
consequence is inevitable: it forfeits relevance to everything natural;
touching nothing actual, it reconstructs nothing actual. Its concretest
incarnation is a dialectic design woven of words. The systems of
tradition, hence, are works of art, to be contemplated, enjoyed, and
believed in, but not to be acted on. For, since action is always
concrete and specific, always determined to time, place, and occasion,
we cannot in fact adapt ourselves to the aggregate infinitude of the
environment, or that to ourselves. Something always stands out,
recalcitrant, invincible, defiant. But it is just such an adaptation
that philosophy intends, and the futility of the intention is evinced by
the fact that the systems of tradition continue side by side with the
realities they deny, and live unmixed in one and the same mind, as a
picture of the ocean on the wall of a dining room in an inland town. Our
operative relations to them tend always to be essentially aesthetic. We
may and do believe in them in spite of life