OP THE UNITY OF THOUGHT. 613 



that this answer has been most impressively given from 

 the other side of the Atlantic, where a new and vigorous 

 civilisation finds itself confronted afresh with the funda- 

 mental questions of conduct and belief. It is, we are 

 told, from the side of practice that these eternal 

 problems have to be attacked. The pessimistic solution 

 of Schopenhauer, that the human Will is the source of 

 evil, has been reversed, and the mainsprings of action 

 have been proclaimed as containing the only revelation 

 that Eeality has vouchsafed to human beings. 



It has been pointed out that this Pragmatism is only 

 a new and telling name for a tendency which is not only 

 revealing itself among original and leading thinkers in 

 the New World, but is to be found also among foremost 

 representatives of European thought, such as Wundt in 

 Germany and Bergson in France. The prominent 

 questions then which philosophy is called upon to 17. 



Questions of 



answer at the end of the nineteenth century are, where certitude of 



J belief and 



to find certitude in matters of belief and conviction, ^ 1 r c a t 1 i ^ or 

 where to find sanction and authority for the rules of 

 conduct ? As speculative knowledge has been discarded, 

 and scientific knowledge is more and more absorbed in 

 the successful investigation of the purely mechanical 

 order of things and the conquest of nature, the question 

 becomes increasingly urgent as to the independent reality 

 of the moral and spiritual factors of life. Are they 

 identical, as one school of modern thinkers maintains ? 

 Can morality be placed upon an independent foundation, 

 and if so, is this scientific and relative or original and 

 absolute ? If, on the other side, morality cannot per- 

 manently live and grow except on a spiritual foundation, 



