If we could do so, materialism as a philosophical doctrine would remain just as absurd as it now is. Genuine idealism, like the foregoing, is utterly careless whether this or that particular surprising thing appears in the phenomenal world, since it once for ail knows that the Whole is divine, an eternal surprise. It seeks no confirmation from the laboratories; but only for illustrations of rationality; nor for its own part does it venture to dictate to the special workers in science what they shall find. It is not forced to beg Nature to contain some occult agency, some vague ethereal essence, or some mysterious and wondrous visible being, whose presence shall be a guaranty to the gaping onlooker that there exists an Ideal. All this mendicant idealism our view rejects as unworthy of any clear-headed thinker. It says, “Look at the facts as they are. Study them as experience gives them. Know them in their naked commonplace reality. But know also that the Ideal Divine Life dwells in them and throughout their whole boundless realm.”
In Plato’s “Parmenides,” the young Socrates confesses that he sometimes hesitates to say that there is an Idea for everything, even for mud. He is rebuked for this fear that men may laugh at him. He is told that mud also is rational. Even so we must fear nobody’s laughter in such a matter. We must see the Divine everywhere. And therefore we must not be going about faithlessly looking for something that shall be wondrous enough to force us to say “Here is God.”
