FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 177 



practicability of the task it sets. It has even declared for its not 

 distant accomplishment; indeed, not impossibly, its accomplishment 

 through the transactions of the Congress itself; and it indicates, by 

 no uncertain signs, the leading, the determining part that philosophy 

 must have in the achievement. In fact, the authorities of the Congress 

 themselves suggest a solution of their own for their problem. In their 

 programme we see a renewed Hierarchy of the Sciences, and at the 

 summit of this appears now again, after so long a period of humiliating 

 obscuration, the figure of Philosophy, raised anew to that supremacy, 

 as Queen of the Sciences, which had been hers from the days of Plato 

 to those of Copernicus, but which she began to lose when modern 

 physical and historical research entered upon its course of sudden 

 development, and which, until recently, she has continued more and 

 more to lose as the sciences have advanced in their career of discover- 

 ies, -- ever more unexpected, more astonishing, yet more convincing 

 and more helpful to the welfare of mankind. May this sign of her 

 recovered empire not fail! If we rejoice at the token, the Congress 

 has made it our part to see that the title is vindicated. It is ours to 

 show this normative function of philosophy, this power to reign as the 

 unifying discipline in the entire realm of our possible knowledge; to 

 show T it by showing that the very nature of philosophy - - its ele- 

 mental concepts and its directing ideals, its methods taken in their 

 systematic succession - - is such as must result in a view of universal 

 reality that will supply the principle at once giving rise to all the- 

 sciences and connecting them all into one harmonious whole. 



Such, and so grave, my honored colleagues, is the duty assigned to- 

 this hour. Sincerely can I say, Would it had fallen to stronger hands- 

 than mine! But since to mine it has been committed, I w r ill undertake 

 it in no disheartened spirit; rather, in that temper of animated hope 

 in which the whole Congress has been conceived and planned. And 

 I draw encouragement from the place, and its associations, where- 

 we are assembled - - from its historic connections not only with the 

 external expansion of our country, but with its growth in culture, 

 and especially with its growth in the cultivation of philosophy. For 

 your speaker, at least, can never forget that here in St. Louis, the 

 metropolis of the region by which our national domain was in the- 

 Louisiana Purchase so enlarged, --here was the centre of a move- 

 ment in philosophic study that has proved to be of national import. 

 It is fitting that we all, here to-day, near to the scene itself, com- 

 memorate the public service done by our present National Commis~ 

 sioner of Education and his group of enthusiastic associates, in 

 beginning here, in the middle years of the preceding century, those 

 studies of Kant and his great idealistic successors that unexpectedly 

 became the nucleus of a wider and more penetrating study of philo- 

 sophy in all parts of our country. It is with quickened memories 



