In justice to idealism it should be added that this is by no means the only species of Rationalism which may lead to such psychic results. There are various paths by which the craving for artificial security may lead to such attempts to reduce the whole of possible experience to logical unity that the realities of time and change and of individual experience are denied. How many deterministic theories, with all their scientific jargon, are really motivated by an inability to accept a world with an element of chance in it. There is a sense in which all science by subsuming like individuals in a common class, and thus ignoring their individuality, in so far as they are alike in certain respects, gains added power over all of them. There is a sense, too, in which science, by discovering that whenever a given combination of elements occurs, a definitely foreseen result will follow, is justified in ignoring time and treating certain futures as if they were already tucked up the sleeves of the present. It should be remembered that this sort of determinism is purely methodological, and is, like all thinking, done for a purpose--that of effecting desirable ends in a world made up of concrete situations. When this purpose becomes supplanted by a passion to discount all future change in general--when one imagines that he has a formula which enables him to write the equation of the curve of the universe, science has degenerated into scientificism, or head-in-the-sand philosophy. The magic formula has precisely the same psychic value as the "absolute." I know a number of economic determinists, for instance, who just cannot get out of their heads the notion that social evolution is a process absolutely underwritten, guaranteed, and predictable, without the least possible doubt. In such a philosophy of history as this the individual is of course a mere "product of his environment," and his role as a creator of value is nil. On this "materialistic" theory, the individual is as truly a mere manifestation of impersonal evolutionary forces as he is, according to orthodox Platonism, a mere manifestation of the abstract idea of his species. Notwithstanding the professed impersonalism of this view, its value for consolation in minimizing the causes of the spiritual difference in men--that is, its function for enhancing the self-feeling of some people, is obvious. That such an idea should become a crowd-idea is not to be wondered at. And this leads me to my point. _It is no mere accident that the crowd takes to rationalistic philosophies like a duck to water._