atters of
science; their intrinsic nature forbade. When the practice of science
went on under such conditions, science and philosophy were one and the
same thing. Both had to do with ultimate reality in its rigid and
insuperable difference from ordinary occurrences.

We have only to refer to the way in which medieval life wrought the
philosophy of an ultimate and supreme reality into the context of
practical life to realize that for centuries political and moral
interests were bound up with the distinction between the absolutely real
and the relatively real. The difference was no matter of a remote
technical philosophy, but one which controlled life from the cradle to
the grave, from the grave to the endless life after death. By means of a
vast institution, which in effect was state as well as church, the
claims of ultimate reality were enforced; means of access to it were
provided. Acknowledgment of The Reality brought security in this world
and salvation in the next. It is not necessary to report the story of
the change which has since taken place. It is enough for our purposes
to note that none of the modern philosophies of a superior reality, or
_the_ real object, idealistic or realistic, holds that its insight makes
a difference like that between sin and holiness, eternal condemnation
and eternal bliss. While in its own context the philosophy of ultimate
reality entered into the vital concerns of men, it now tends to be an
ingenious dialectic exercised in professorial corners by a few who have
retained ancient premises while rejecting their application to the
conduct of life.

The increased isolation from science of any philosophy identified with
the problem of _the_ real is equally marked. For the growth of science
has consisted precisely in the invention of an equipment, a technique of
appliances and procedures, which, accepting all occurrences as
homogeneously real, proceeds to distinguish the authenticated from the
spurious, the true from the false, by specific modes of treatment in
specific situations. The procedures of the trained engineer, of the
competent physician, of the laboratory expert, have turned out to be the
only ways of discriminating the counterfeit from the valid. And they
have revealed that the difference is not one of antecedent fixity of
existence, but one of mode of treatment and of the consequences thereon
attendant. After mankind has learned to put its trust in specific
procedures in ord