Loyalty, like the rest of human life, is an illusion. Nature is real.
The unity of the spirit is a fancy.
This, I say, may be your objection. But herewith we indeed stand in the
presence of a certain very deep philosophical problem concerning the
true definition of what we mean by reality. Into this problem I have
neither time nor wish to enter just now. But upon one matter I must,
nevertheless, stoutly insist. It is a matter so simple, so significant,
so neglected, that I at once need and fear to mention it to you,--need
to mention it, because it puts our philosophy into a position that quite
transforms the significance of that whole modern view of nature upon
which I have been dwelling since the outset of this lecture; fear to
mention it, because the fact that it is so commonly neglected shows how
hard to be understood it has proved.
That disheartening view of the foreign and mechanical nature of the real
world which our sciences and our industrial arts have impressed upon the
minds of so many of us; that contempt for superstition; that denial of
the supernatural, which seems to the typical modern man the beginning of
wisdom;--to what is all this view of reality due? To the results, and,
as I believe, to the really important results, of the modern study of
natural science.
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