Pure idealism has long ago proved too intoxicating a confirmation of our hopes and desires to seduce for long our tough-mindedness. Science has come as a challenge to both our courage and our honesty. It covertly taunts us with being afraid to face the universe as it is; if we look and are saddened, we have seemed to prove ourselves less than men. For this advance of scientific speculation has seemed only to increase the gulf between the proven and certain facts, and all the values and significances of life that our reactions to its richness have produced in us. And so incorrigibly honest is the texture of the human mind that we cannot continue to believe in and cultivate things that we no longer believe to be real. And science has undermined our faith in a spiritual world that to our forefathers was the only reality in the universe. We are so honest, however, that when the scientist relegates to a subjective shadowy realm our world of qualities and divinities, we cannot protest, but only look wistfully after the disappearing forms. A numbness has stolen over our religion, art, and literature, and the younger generation finds a chill and torpor in those interests of life that should be the highest inspiration.
Randolph S. Bourne, Youth and Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), pg. 193.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2013/11/17/585/