The lapse of philosophy from her former significance and vitality is the result of the exaggerated emphasis placed on the epistemological problem by modern thinkers; and this in turn is in great part due to the difficulties on which Descartes stumbled in his effort to reconcile his belief in mechanism with his desire to placate the Jesuits. How minor a rôle is played by the problems of the relation between subject and object, the validity of knowledge, epistemological realism and idealism, in a frankly mechanist philosophy, appears in Bacon, Hobbes, and Spinoza;[298] these men--deducting Bacon’s astute obeisance to theology--know what they want and say what they mean; they presume, with a maturity so natural as to be mistaken for _naïveté_, that the validity of thought is a matter to be decided by action rather than by theory; they take it for granted that the supreme and ultimate purpose of philosophy is not analysis but synthesis, not the intellectual categorizing of experience but the intelligent reconstruction of life. Indeed, as one pursues this clew through the devious--almost stealthy--course of modern speculation it appears that no small part of the epistemological development has been made up of the oscillations, compromises, and obscurities natural in men who were the exponents and the victims of a painful transition. Civilization was passing from one intellectual basis to another; and in these weird epistemologs the vast process came uncomfortably to semiconsciousness. They were old bottles bursting with new wine; and their tragedy was that they knew it. They clung to the old world even while the new one was swimming perilously into their ken; they found a pitiful solace in the old phrases, the old paraphernalia of a dead philosophy; and in the suffering of their readjustment there was, quite inevitably, some measure of self-deception. And that is why they are so hard to understand. Even so subtle a thinker as Santayana finds them too difficult, and abandons them in righteous indignation. There is no worse confounding of confusion than self-deception: let a man be honest with himself, and he may lie with tolerable intelligibility and success; but let him be his own dupe and he may write a thousand critiques and never get himself understood. Indeed, some of them do not want to be understood, they only want to be believed. Hegel, for example, was not at all surprised to find that no one understood him; he would have been surprised and chagrined to find that some one had. Obscurity can cover a multitude of sins.