The modern age, Dewey continues, brought intelligence back to earth again, but only partially. Fixed being was still supposed to be the object of thought. "The principle of the inherent relation of thought to being was preserved intact, but its practical locus was moved down from the next world to this."[241] Aristotle's mode of dealing with the Platonic ideas was followed, and Spinoza was the great exponent of "the strict correlation of the attribute of matter with the attribute of thought." But, again, the modern conception of knowledge failed to do justice to belief, in spite of the compromise that gave the natural world to intelligence, and the spiritual world to faith. This compromise could not endure, for Science encroached upon the field of religious belief, and invaded the sphere of the personal and emotional. "Knowledge, in its general theory, as philosophy, went the same way. It was pre-committed to the old notion: the absolutely real is the object of _knowledge_, and hence is something universal and impersonal. So, whether by the road of sensationalism or rationalism, by the path of mechanicalism or objective idealism, it came about that concrete selves, specific feeling and willing beings, were relegated with the beliefs in which they declare themselves to the 'phenomenal.'"[242] Feeling, volition, desiring thought have never received the justice due them in the whole course of philosophy. This is Dewey's conclusion. Little can be said in praise of his historical survey. There is scarcely a statement to which exception could not be taken, for the history of philosophy is not amenable to generalized treatment of this character. The reader turns more hopefully toward the third part of the essay, in which he is promised a positive statement of the new theory which does full justice to belief. "First, then, the very use of the knowledge standpoint, the very expression of the knowledge preoccupation, has produced methods and tests that, when formulated, intimate a radically different conception of knowledge, and of its relation to existence and belief, than the orthodox one."[243] But after this not unpromising introduction, Dewey falls into the polemical strain again. The argument need not be followed in detail, since it consists largely in a reassertion of the validity of belief as an element in knowledge. The general conclusion is that modern scientific investigation reveals itself, when examined, as nothing more that the "rendering into a systematic technique, into an art deliberately and delightfully pursued, the rougher and cruder means by which practical human beings have in all ages worked out the implications of their beliefs, tested them, and endeavored in the interests of economy, efficiency, and freedom, to render them coherent with one another."[244] This is presumably true. If no more is implied than is definitely asserted in this passage, the reader is apt to wonder who would deny it.