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.
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