And even among those who did not mean to be critics, we find some devoutly maintaining that divine revelation brings naught that reason and experience cannot confirm; naught, then, they could not have reached: “Non alia est philosophia, _i.e._, sapientiae studium, et alia religio,” writes John Scotus in the ninth century. “Quid est aliud de philosophia tractare nisi verae religionis regulas exponere? Conficitur inde veram esse philosophiam veram religionem conversimque veram religionem esse veram philosophiam.” (_De praedest. proem._) But those who from revelation turn to _reason_ and those who turn to _experience_ for evidence in all matters, are of two different tempers of mind and habits of thought. The first we found represented in Spinoza with his _Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata_; the second in Hume with his methods of natural history and human history. Of these two schools, I think we may regard the first as definitely closed. That is, to establish the existence of God by logic alone and as a necessity of thought, would only be dreamed of today by those who meant by God, by logic, and by thought’s necessity something quite different from anything the seventeenth century rationalist could have meant by those terms. Yet to say that the _method_ of a Spinoza is dead, is not to say that his contribution to the spiritual problems with which he dealt is naught. Nothing could be more important to our whole attitude toward these problems than Spinoza’s insight: The scientific demand that we treat nature as an inviolable mechanism and the ethical demand that the human element in nature remain a free agent _are consistent_. It can readily be seen that all the rest of one’s thoughts about the world must hang upon one’s acceptance or non-acceptance of this reconciliation of mechanical necessity and living freedom. (It must not be supposed, however, that all later thought was agreed that Spinoza had effected this reconciliation; perhaps the present writer is without company in thinking that Spinoza’s indications in this sense may be followed to a clear and satisfactory issue.) If the method of rationalism has lost meaning for us, do we then abide in the confidence that experimental science must find all that is to be found of an object for religion to attach itself to? To my thinking, no! Or rather, the meaning of experience and with it of empirical science has been so altered by later reflection that the relation between human desire and human finding is no longer conceived to be that austere separation which a Hume, a Clifford or a Huxley made the basis of intellectual honesty and even of moral honor.