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The Fundamentals thought awhile ago that idealism had come to the Kingdom to save us from materialistic science, and it did good service. But idealism has become so abstract and impersonal that it cannot be distinguished from Naturalism. These two phil osophies are still debating and disputing, but their differences are chiefly imaginary. The dispute reminds one of the reply of the unlearned American who had traveled abroad. He was saying he had visited the Matterhorn and the Jung Frau, and Lake Geneva and Lake Leman. “But,” a friend inter posed, Lake Geneva and Lake Leman are synonymous.” Oh, I know that, but Lake Geneva is a great deal more synonymous than Lake Leman,” he replied. Idealism in its abstract form is perhaps just a little more “synonymous” than Naturalism, that is all. SECRET OF PHILOSOPHY S FAILURE ' Now why is it that philosophy seems to expend so much labor for naught. To me it is clear that the reason why it seems to labor so long without satisfactory results is that it refuses to consider all human experience, including the re ligious. I t splits experience up into little bits and hunts among the bits for some single abstract principle which will explain all the rest. It is very much as if one were going to attempt to explain the ocean and all its contents, its variety and mar velous abundance of life, and instead of searching its depths should take a single fish and scale off from the fish a single scale, and on that scale as a foundation build up his theory of the ocean and its contents; how accurate do you suppose his account would be ? And yet this is analagous to what phil osophers have done. Spinoza scaled off from the world of experience and being the idea of substance, and built a pan theistic system on that scale. Hegel scaled off the concep tion of reason or the idea and reared a vast idealistic system on that. Schopenhauer scaled off the conception of will and reared his pessimistic system of philosophy on that. Haeckel
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