faith, because your experience appears to be better accounted for in that way. Whatever experiences and insights you may appeal to by way of substantiation of your faith, your appeal is always for reasons, and it is the philosopher's province to render these explicit. You may shrink from acknowledging these reasons, alleging that your faith far surpasses reason, but you will always do this with lame reasoning in face of the opportunity to stand erect and indulge in maturity of thought. Your only resource, when you dislike the philosopher's statement, is to reason more adequately than he.

Those of us who meet life reflectively are steadily making observations and constructive judgments, and thus we are gradually rearing a theory of the world. This need not imply originality, for we pass through the same process in the study of the great systems of thought. Every now and then we see these systems in a new way and thus we advance a stage in our insight. No one can expect to understand a system who does not as it were live with it as one might dwell with friends under the same roof through varying conditions. But the point is that we mediate, react upon everything we touch. Since this is true, why should we not begin on as sound a basis as possible, making sure of our facts and drawing valid inferences? For many of us this would mean beginning with the