214 PHILOSOPHY 



and upon the adherence to ethical ideas, that Herbert Spencer will 

 be found most clearly entitled to a lasting honor. 



III. The third number of our difficult tasks is to summarize the 

 principal results, to inventory the net profits, as it were, of the devel- 

 opment of philosophy during the nineteenth century. This task is 

 made the more difficult by the heterogeneous nature and as yet 

 unclassified condition of the development. With the quickening 

 and diversifying of all kinds and means of intercourse, there has 

 come the breaking-down of national schools and idiosyncrasies of 

 method and of thought. In philosophy, Germany, France, Great 

 Britain, and indeed, Italy, have come to intermingle their streams 

 of influence; and from all these countries these streams have been 

 flowing in upon America. In psychology, especially, as well as in all 

 the other sciences, but also to some degree in philosophy, returning 

 streams of influence from America have, during the last decade or 

 two, been felt in Europe itself. 



It must also be admitted that the attempts at a reconstruction of 

 systematic philosophy which have followed the rapid disintegration 

 of the Hegelian system, and the enormous accumulations of new 

 material due to the extension of historical studies and of the par- 

 ticular sciences, -- including especially the so-called "new psycho- 

 logy, " - have not as yet been fruitful of large results. In philo- 

 sophy, as in art, politics, and even scientific theory, the spirit and 

 the opportunity of the time are more favorable to the gathering of 

 material and to the projecting of a bewildering variety of new opin- 

 ions, or old opinions put forth under new names, than to that candid, 

 patient, and prolonged reflection and balancing of judgment which 

 a worthy system-building inexorably requires. The age of breaking up 

 the old, without assimilating the new, has not yet passed away. And 

 whatever is new, startling, large, even monstrous, has in many 

 quarters the seeming preference, in philosophy's building as in other 

 architecture. To the confusion which reigns even in scholastic 

 circles, contributions have been arriving from the outside, from 

 philosophers like Nietzsche, and from men great in literature like 

 Tolstoi. Nor has the matter been helped by the more recent extreme 

 developments of positivism and skepticism, which often enough, 

 without any consciousness of their origin and without the respect 

 for morality and religion which Kant always evinced, really go back 

 to the critical philosophy. 



In spite of all this, however, the last two decades or more have 

 shown certain hopeful tendencies and notable achievements, look- 

 ing toward the reconstruction of systematic philosophy. In this 

 attempt to bring order out of confusion, to enable calm, prolonged, 

 and reflective thinking to build into its structure the riches of the 

 new material which the evolution of the race has secured, a place 



