Conditions and forces that dominate in actual fact the modern world have not attained any coherent intellectual expression of themselves. We live, as is so often remarked, in astate of divided allegiance. In outward activities and current enjoyments, we are frenetically absorbed in mun- dane affairs in ways which, if they were formulated for in- tellectual acceptance, would be repudiated as low and un- worthy. We give our emotional and theoretical assent to prin- ciples and creeds which are no longer actively operative in life. We have retained enough of the older tradition to recognize that aphilosophy which formulated what, on the whole and in the mass, we are most concerned with, would be intolerably materialistic in character. On the other hand, we are not pre- pared, either intellectually or morally, to frame such aphiloso- phy of the interests and activities that actually dominate our lives as would elevate them to aplane of truly liberal and humane significance. We are unable to show that the ideals, values and meanings which the philosophy we nominally hold places in another world, are capable of characterizing in a concrete form, with some measure of security, the world in which we live, that of our actual experience. On this account any sincere empirical philosophy that holds to the possibility of the latter alternative must be prophetic rather than descriptive.