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I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself.
The difference does not arise from any lesser stringency in the claims of Christianity to spiritual dominion, but rather, I imagine, from a deep-seated divergence in racial heredity. We Western Aryans have behind us the serene and splendid rationalisms of Greece and Rome.
The only means of union between the nation and the intellectual and moral aristocracy, which has kept and guarded that treasure, as well as the only link between these two aristocratic views of life themselves, would be furnished by religion, a religion such as Lessing, Mendelssohn, and above all Schleiermacher, propounded, such as reigned all over Germany forty or fifty years ago, before party spirit had set to work, and the flattest of rationalisms had again invaded the nation a religion corresponding, for the mass, to what Goethe's and Kant's philosophy, which is neither materialism nor spiritualism, is for the few a religion based on feeling and intuition, on conscience and reverence, but a religion without dogmas, without ritual, without forms, above all without exclusiveness and without intolerance.
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