Perhaps the most important feature of the book is the prominence it gives to the difficulties and insufficiencies of idealism. With those of realism we are all familiar enough, but so far, idealism has been looked at one-sidedly as evading, if not solving, some of the antinomies of the earlier philosophy, while its own embarrassments have been condoned in hopes of future solution. The solution has not come, and now the hopes are dead or dying. What we need is a higher synthesis, if such be possible for the human mind, or else a frank admission that faith, in some sense or other, is a necessary complement of every philosophy. One thing is clear, that reconciliation can be effected, if at all, only by a fair-minded admission of difficulties inseparable from either system, and by a conscientious criticism of presuppositions. No one can deal effectually with the idealist position to whom it is simply "absurd" or "ridiculous;" who has not been to some degree intellectually entangled in it; whose realism is not more or less of an effort. Else he is dealing with some man of straw of his own fancy, and will be found, as so often happens, assuming the truth of realism in every argument he brings forward. Plainly the best minds of modern times have not been victimized by a fallacy within the competence of a school-boy. And a like intellectual self-denial is needed on the part of the idealist, who is apt to dismiss all realism as crude, uncritical, or barbaric. We have all our antinomies, our blind alleys, our crudities; and we have all to fill up awkward interstices with assumptions and postulates.