172 PHILOSOPHY 



should be indignant with, or feel contempt for, any who seek to limit or proscribe 

 their research. But supposing this work all done, there remains another question 

 respecting the causality and interpretation of the facts. This question belongs to 

 philosophy. Science describes and registers the facts with their temporal and 

 spatial laws; philosophy studies their causality and significance. And while the 

 scientist justly ignores the philosopher who interferes with his inquiries, so the 

 philosopher may justly reproach the scientist who fails to see that the scientific 

 question does not touch the philosophic one. . . . 



In the field of metaphysics proper I note a strong tendency toward personal 

 idealism, or as it might be called, Personalism; that is, the doctrine that sub- 

 stantial reality can be conceived only under the personal form and that all else is 

 phenomenal. This is quite distinct from the traditional idealisms of mere concep- 

 tionism. It holds the essential fact to be a community of persons with a Supreme 

 Person at their head while the phenomenal world is only expression and means 

 of communication. And to this view we are led by the failure of philosophizing on 

 the impersonal plane, which is sure to lose itself in contradiction and impossi- 

 bility. Under the form of mechanical naturalism, with its tendencies to mate- 

 rialism and atheism, impersonalism has once more been judged and found want- 

 ing. We are not likely to have a recurrence of this view unless there be a return 

 to philosophical barbarism. But impersonalism at the opposite pole in the form 

 of abstract categories of being, causality, unity, identity, continuity, sufficient 

 reason, etc., is equally untenable. Criticism shows that these categories when 

 abstractly and impersonally taken cancel themselves. On the impersonal plane we 

 can never reach unity from plurality, or plurality from unity; and we can never 

 find change in identity, or identity in change. Continuity in time becomes mere 

 succession without the notion of potentiality, and this in turn is empty. Exist- 

 ence itself is dispersed into nothingness through the infinite divisibility of space 

 and time, while the law of the sufficient reason loses itself in barren tautology and 

 the infinite regress. The necessary logical equivalence of cause and effect in any 

 impersonal scheme makes all real explanation and progress impossible, and shuts 

 us up to an unintelligible oscillation between potentiality and actuality, to which 

 there is no corresponding thought. . . . 



Philosophy is still militant and has much work before it, but the omens are 

 auspicious, the problems are better understood, and we are coming to a synthesis 

 of the results of past generations of thinking which will be a very distinct progress. 

 Philosophy has already done good service, and never better than in recent times, 

 by destroying pretended knowledge and making room for the higher faiths of 

 humanity. It has also done good service in helping these faiths to better rational 

 form, and thus securing them against the defilements of superstition and the 

 cavilings of hostile critics. With all its aberrations and shortcomings, philosophy 

 deserves well of humanity. 



