of things": not the isolation of individual phenomena, or even of groups
of phenomena, as is the method of the natural sciences, but the setting
of all in their varied relationships and values, the antithesis of that
narrowness and concentration of vision that follow intensive
specialization and have issue in infinite delusions and unrealities,
"Philosophy regards the sum-total of reality" and it achieves this
consciousness of reality, first by establishing right relations between
phenomena, and then, abandoning the explicit intellectual process, by
falling back on divine illumination which enables it to see through
those well-ordered phenomena the Divine Actuality that lies behind,
informing them with its own finality and using them both as types and as
media of transmission and communication. So men are enabled by
philosophy "to put things in their right order" and by religion "to
control them well," thus becoming indeed worthy to be "called wise."

Now, from the beginnings of conscious life, man has found himself
surrounded and besieged by un-calculable phenomena. Beaten upon by
forces he could not estimate or predict or control, he has sought to
solve their sphynx-like riddle, to establish some plausible relation
between them, to erect a logical scheme of things. Primitive man, as
Worringer demonstrates in his "Form Problems of the Gothic," strove to
achieve something of certitude and fixity through the crude but definite
lines and forms of neolithic art. Classical man brought into play the
vigour and subtlety and ingenuity of intellect in its primal and most
dynamic form, expressed through static propositions of almost
mathematical exactness. The peoples of the East rejected the
intellectual-mathematical method and solution and sought a way out
through the mysterious operation of the inner sense that manifests
itself in the form of emotion. With the revelation of Christianity came
also, and of course, enlightenment, which was not definite and closed at