For some reason or other, or for some strange combination of reasons, the phenomenon that we call “action”[167] (the activity of man as an agent) and the apparently simple facts of the reality and the intelligibility of action have long been regarded as matters of altogether secondary or subordinate importance by the rationalism of philosophy and by the mechanical philosophy of science. This Rationalism and this ostensibly certain and demonstrable mechanical philosophy of science suppose that the one problem of human thought is simply that of the nature of truth or of the nature of reality (the reality of the “physical” world) as if either (or each) of these things were an entity on its own account, an absolutely final finding or consideration. That this has really been the case so far as philosophy is concerned is proved by the fact even of the existence of the many characteristic deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in respect of Pragmatism to which reference has already been made in the preceding chapter. And that it has also been the case so far as science is concerned is proved by the existence of the many dogmatic attempts of many natural philosophers from Holbach to Haeckel to apply the “iron laws” of matter and motion to the reality of everything else under heaven,[168] and of everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent confessions of their own colleagues with regard to the actual and the necessary limits and limitations of science and of the scientific outlook.