"If man is to retain the full endowment of his moral nature, we must make up our minds to accept for ourselves an incomplete theory of things." A philosophy which should unify the sum-total of human experience, including the supernatural facts of Christianity, is impossible; but even excluding these facts there is always need of some kind of non-rational assent, which, however reasonable and prudent in the very interests of thought, is not necessitated by the laws of thought--is not, in the strictest sense philosophical. Idealism, like other philosophies, "is not satisfied with an imperfect knowledge of the greatest things. It must rise to the Divine standpoint and comprehend the concrete universal," and so, of course, it breaks down. "But it would surely be a hasty inference," says Mr. D'Arcy, "that philosophy must needs be exhausted because idealism has done its work and delivered its message to mankind," that is, has explored another blind alley, and has arrived at the _cul de sac_. In fact, if idealism is a living philosophy, it is nevertheless showing signs of age and decay. Ptolemaic astronomy, as an explanation of planetary movements, proved its exhaustion by a liberal recourse to epicycles as the answer to all awkward objections; and philosophies show themselves moribund in an analogous way, by a monotonous pressing of some one hackneyed principle to a degree that makes common-sense revolt and fling the whole theory to the winds--chaff and grain indiscriminately. But philosophy must be distinguished from philosophies, as religion from religions. The imperfection of the various concrete attempts to satisfy either spiritual need, may make the desperate-minded wish to cut themselves free from all connection with any particular system; but the desire and effort to have a knowledge of the whole (_i.e._, a philosophy) is as natural and ineradicable as the desire to live and breathe. In this general sense, philosophy "takes human experience, sets it out in all its main elements, and then endeavours to form a plan of systematic thought which will account for the whole. It has one fundamental postulate, that there is a meaning, or, in other words, that there is an all-pervading unity." This "faith" in the ultimate coherence and unity of everything is the presupposition and motive of the very attempt to philosophize or to determine the nature of that unity. It is not, therefore, itself a product of philosophy; it is an innate conviction that can be denied only from the teeth outwards, but can neither be proved nor disproved by the finite mind.