We West Europeans have apparently again reached the fruitful stage when man is not simply alive to this or that physical or psychic need, nor even to the practical interest and advantage of this or that Art, Science, Sociology, Politics, Ethics; but when he awakens further to the question as to why and how these several activities, all so costly where at all effectual, can deserve all this sacrifice--can be based in anything sufficiently abiding and objective. The history of all the past efforts, and indeed all really adequate richness of immediate outlook, combine, I think, to answer that only the experience and the conviction of an Objective Reality distinct from, and more than, man, or indeed than the whole of the world apprehended by man as less than, or as equal to, man himself, can furnish sufficiently deep and tenacious roots for our sense and need of an objective supreme Beauty, Truth, and Goodness--of a living Reality already overflowing that which, in lesser degrees and ways, we small realities cannot altogether cease from desiring to become. It is Religion which, from first to last, but with increasing purity and power, brings with it this evidence and conviction. Its sense of the Objective, Full Reality of God, and its need of Adoration are quite essential to Religion, although considerable systems, which are largely satisfactory in the more immediate questions raised by Aesthetics and even by Ethics, and which are sincerely anxious to do justice also to the religious sense, are fully at work to explain away these essential characteristics of all wideawake Religion. Paul Natorp, the distinguished Plato-scholar in Germany, the short-lived pathetically eloquent M. Guyau in France, and, above all, Benedetto Croce, the large encyclopaedic mind in Italy, have influenced or led much of this movement, which, in questions of Religion, has assuredly not reached the deepest and most tenacious teachings of life.