psalm beginning with, "The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork." If I could convey the effect of this to my reader I should have given him the problem in all of its dramatic significance. How can one-I will not say that one cannot-but how does one face modern astronomy and yet believe in God?

For it is in the contemplation of the astronomical universe that we face the deeper mystery of our existence; and of this universe, not as displayed in the calm beauty of a star-lit night, but as unfolded by the science of astronomy. Here we are bidden to remember that the earth, which is to us so vast, is but one of the minor planets in one of countless systems; that only very recently, geologically and astronomically speaking, has the earth supported life, and yet that the human race has existed for hundred thousands, possibly millions, of years. But only for a few thousand years does the race seem to have been very human or to have had any clear consciousness of itself as a race; and of the millions upon millions of souls who have lived during this historic period, for each of whom doubtless, as for you and me, his own life and the fate of his own soul has seemed to be the central and important fact of the universe, the names of only a few survive. What, then, does the world know about you or me? What indeed is the whole realm of life but a fortuitous concourse of atoms at one point in an infinity of space and time?

Man, as I have said above, is the only animal who knows that he is an animal; and this to him means that he is the only important animal. Yet I have sometimes wondered whether this self-consciousness might not mean only that of all animals man is the most ridiculous and contemptible. And one may imagine-though whether one may, is pre

cisely the question-an ironical snail or oyster who, accepting the starry heavens above him, thanks God that he at least has no illusions of importance and has been spared the temptation to think of himself as other than he is.

And yet again "the moral law within us". My one purpose in this volume has been to present to the reader's imagination, and to get into my own, all that is implied in "the moral law"-so vastly more, I believe, than is suspected in any of the common talk about "sound morality". As I see it the moral law means nothing less than the supreme and exclusive importance of the conscious life-of the person. Nothing is good, it asserts with Kant, but the good will. And with this assertion the moral law faces the starry heavens above and rejects all compromise-all of those utilitarian compromises which would reconcile life to fact by a renunciation of the meaning of life, all those which would make the consciousness of life an instrument of "life". "The moral law" asserts the supreme value of the conscious life for its own sake; and therefore the supreme value of each person for his own sake. With Kant once more, each is to be regarded always as an end in himself, never as a means. This implies a truly "social" world; and what is much more, a social universe, a universe in which we may in some sense expect to find God. But this only means again that in the social universe each person is all-important.

How can this assertion be made in the presence of the starry heavens above us-as the nature of the heavens is revealed by astronomical science? How can the starry heavens and the moral law both be sublime? For if anything be sublime it must at least be real. Yet if the firmament of science be sublime-which for science can mean

only that it is big-the moral law looks like an accident; nay less, an illusion. And if the moral law be sublime the firmament of science seems similarly an illusion.

Or may we say that the scientific firmament is a peculiar and limited version of a universe which in the end, understood as we understand the life of our human fellows, is the expression of the same moral law that we find in ourselves? This, I suspect, was in Kant's mind when he declared the moral law and the starry heavens to be both sublime.

And thus among the many problems set by the presence of the moral law is the problem of truth and reality, the problem of knowledge. Life is an activity of imagination; the world in which we live is a world of imagination; is it therefore an imaginary world?

CHAPTER XV

THE EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH

§ 60. The man of science and the man of culture. § 61. "Mere ideas" and the picture-psychology. § 62. "Mere feelings." § 63. Science and anthropomorphic prejudice. § 64. Truth and satisfied imagination. § 65. Error and lack of imagination. § 66. Experience of reality vs. coherence and correspondence.

I

MPORTANT among the moral questions as here con

ceived is the question, What is truth? In the answers commonly given it seems that truth is an impersonal relation: a relation of coherence among our ideas, for one view; for the other a relation of correspondence between ideas and facts. For these views it seems that truth is not a moral question-rather perhaps an "intellectual" question. I may then distinguish the moral question by asking, What is the experience of truth?

But this will compel us to ask, What is the experience of "ideas"? And of "feelings"? And for the purpose of stating all of these questions I will suggest the following situation.

§ 60

Let us suppose that we have before us, in a college catalogue, the long list of courses constituting a modern curriculum. Half of the courses bear titles that are more or less unintelligible, each of them is to be identified in the end only by its number. The catalogue does not thus far seem to be very lively reading or at first glance very signif

icant. Yet a moment's reflection will tell us that what lies here listed before us is the greater part of the many and various developments or expressions of the human spirit. And what the curriculum would represent if it could, is a tout ensemble of reflective human life.

If we now go a step further we shall find that by common consent these studies are divided roughly into two classes, known respectively as the sciences and the humanities; or as scientific studies and culture studies. Typical scientific studies are physics, chemistry, and biology. Typical culture studies are languages with their literatures-in a word, literary criticism; but also art and art criticism; and properly also (though not often found in the college curriculum) music and musical criticism. But to these we should add the study of philosophy, so far at least as philosophy includes moral philosophy, the philosophy of beauty, or the philosophy of religion. And thus we find on the one side science; on the other literature and poetry, art, music, morality, religion. On the one side (let us say for the moment) knowledge; on the other, taste, feeling and insight. It seems, then, that in the distinction of science and culture we have two worlds of discourse. By Royce they are named the world of description and the world of appreciation. By others the world of facts and the world of values. Having in mind the foregoing chapter I prefer to call them here the world of fact and the world of imagination.

What, then, is the difference? Putting this question to a professor of science, he will probably answer as follows. All of these studies, he may admit, stand for operations of the human spirit. Science no less than the other studies has a human history. But in science-and in science alone -the spirit does more than operate; it operates upon some