2o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



no business to speak up in the universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, 

 Mill, Caird, Hegel — I prudently avoid names nearer home ! — I am 

 sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are little more than 

 reminders of as many curious personal ways of falling short. It would 

 be an obvious absurdity if such ways of taking the universe were 

 actually true. 



We philosophers have to reckon with such feelings on your part. 

 In the last resort, I repeat, it will be by them that all our philosophies 

 shall ultimately be judged. The finally victorious way of looking at 

 things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run 

 of minds. 



One word more — namely about philosophies necessarily being ab- 

 stract outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings 

 that are fat, conceived in the cube, by their planner, and outlines of 

 buildings invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass. 

 These remain skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and 

 mortar, and the outline already suggests that result. An outline in 

 itself is meagre, truly, but it does not necessarily suggest a meagre 

 thing. It is the essential meagreness of what is suggested by the usual 

 rationalistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their gesture of 

 rejection. The case of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point 

 here. Eationalists feel his fearful array of insufficiencies. His dry 

 schoolmaster temperament, the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his 

 preference for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education 

 even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all his 

 fundamental ideas, his whole system wooden, as if knocked together 

 out of cracked hemlock boards — and yet the half of England wants to 

 bury him in Westminster Abbey. 



Why ? Why does Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his 

 weakness in rationalistic eyes? Why should so many educated men 

 who feel that weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the 

 Abbey notwithstanding? 



Simply because we feel his heart to be in the right place philo- 

 sophically. His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any rate 

 his books try to mold themselves upon the particular shape of this par- 

 ticular world's carcase. The noise of facts resounds through all his 

 chapters, the citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes facts, turns his 

 face towards their quarter; and that is enough. It means the right 

 hind of thing for the empiricist mind. 



The pragmatistic philosophy of which I hope to begin talking in 

 another article preserves as cordial a relation with facts, and, unlike 

 Spencer's philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive 

 religious constructions out of doors. It treats them cordially as well. 



I hope I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking 

 that you require. 



