Because the ‘abstract’ sciences cannot and do not attempt to reach ultimate truth, it is assumed that they are altogether ‘barren forms,’ This is the error of much Oriental mysticism, which denies all value to what it regards as the lower categories.  In his later writings Mr. Tyrrell objects to being classed with the American and English pragmatists—­the school of Mr. William James.  But the doctrine of these passages is ultra-pragmatist.  The will, which is illegitimately stretched to include feeling,[80] is treated as the creator as well as the discerner of reality.  The ‘world of appearance’ is plastic in its grasp.  It is this metaphysical pragmatism which is really serviceable to Modernism.  If the categories of the understanding can be so disparaged as to be allowed no independent truth, value, or importance, all collisions between faith and fact may be avoided by discrediting in advance any conclusions at which science may arrive.  Assertions about ‘brute fact’ which are scientifically false may thus not be untrue when taken out of the scientific plane, because outside that plane they are harmless word-pictures, soap-bubbles blown off by the poetical creativeness of faith Any assertion about fact which commends itself to the will and affections and which is proved by experience to furnish nutriment to the spiritual life, may be adhered to without scruple.  It is not only useful, but true, in the only sense in which truth can be predicated of anything in the higher sphere.

The obvious criticism on this notion of religious truth as purely moral and practical is that it is itself abstract and one-sided.  The universe as it appears to discursive thought, with its vast system of seemingly uniform laws, which operate without much consideration for our wishes or feelings, must be at least an image of the real universe.  We cannot accept the irreconcilable dualism between the will-world and the world of phenomena which the philosophical Modernists assume.  The dualism, or rather the contradiction, is not in the nature of things, nor in the constitution of our minds, but in the consciousness of the unhappy men who are trying to combine two wholly incompatible theories.  On the critical side they are pure rationalists, much as they dislike the name.  They claim, as we have seen, to have advanced to philosophy through criticism.  But the Modernist critics start with very well-defined presuppositions.  They ridicule the notion that ’God is a personage in history’; they assume that for the historian ’He cannot be found anywhere’; that He is as though He did not exist.  On the strength of this presupposition, and for no other reason, they proceed to rule out, without further investigation, all alleged instances of divine intervention in history.  Unhampered by any of the misgivings which predispose the ordinary believer to conservatism, they follow the rationalist argument to its logical conclusions with startling ruthlessness.  And then, when the