s in all
their diversity and thatness. Speaking summarily, I find that the
retention by philosophy of the notion of a Reality feudally superior to
the events of everyday occurrence is the chief source of the increasing
isolation of philosophy from common sense and science. For the latter
do not operate in any such region. As with them of old, philosophy in
dealing with real difficulties finds itself still hampered by reference
to realities more real, more ultimate, than those which directly happen.

I have said that identifying the cause of philosophy with the notion of
superior reality is the cause of an _increasing_ isolation from science
and practical life. The phrase reminds us that there was a time when the
enterprise of science and the moral interests of men both moved in a
universe invidiously distinguished from that of ordinary occurrence.
While all that happens is equally real--since it really
happens--happenings are not of equal worth. Their respective
consequences, their import, varies tremendously. Counterfeit money,
although real (or rather _because_ real), is really different from valid
circulatory medium, just as disease is really different from health;
different in specific structure and so different in consequences. In
occidental thought, the Greeks were the first to draw the distinction
between the genuine and the spurious in a generalized fashion and to
formulate and enforce its tremendous significance for the conduct of
life. But since they had at command no technique of experimental
analysis and no adequate technique of mathematical analysis, they were
compelled to treat the difference of the true and the false, the
dependable and the deceptive, as signifying two kinds of existence, the
truly real and the apparently real.

Two points can hardly be asserted with too much emphasis. The Greeks
were wholly right in the feeling that questions of good and ill, as far
as they fall within human control, are bound up with discrimination of
the genuine from the spurious, of "being" from what only pretends to be.
But because they lacked adequate instrumentalities for coping with this
difference in specific situations, they were forced to treat the
difference as a wholesale and rigid one. Science was concerned with
vision of ultimate and true reality; opinion was concerned with getting
along with apparent realities. Each had its appropriate region
permanently marked off. Matters of opinion could never become m