i94 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



I have no right to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos 

 in the class-room sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you 

 in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technicaly treated. 

 I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in 

 which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to 

 you who are not students. Whatever universe a professor believes in 

 must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. 

 A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the pro- 

 fessorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap 

 kind ! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philos- 

 ophy in this very hall, but they soon grew technical, and then dry, and 

 the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a 

 bold one. The founder of pragmatism himself recently gave a course 

 of lectures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title — 

 flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness ! None 

 of us, I fancy, understand all that he said — yet here I stand, making 

 a very similar venture. 



I risk it because the very lectures I speak of drew — they brought 

 good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination 

 in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the 

 disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we 

 feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a 

 smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good 

 and evil, and see how every one in the place pricks up his ears. Phi- 

 losophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's queerest 

 arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity. 



Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that 

 a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, 

 per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation. 



Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of 

 human pursuits. It both works in the minutest crannies and opens 

 out the widest vistas. It e bakes no bread,' as has been said, but it 

 can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its 

 doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to 

 common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing 

 beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. These illumina- 

 tions, at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that 

 accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is more than 

 professional or technical. 



The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain 

 clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may 

 seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this 

 clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by 

 it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries 



