FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 175 



and widening roadways of (1) Intuition and Deduction; (2) Ex- 

 perience and Induction; (3) Intuition and Experience adjusted by 

 Critical Limits; (4) Skepticism reinforced and made grwast-afnrm- 

 ative by Desire and Will; (5) Empiricism enlarged by substitu- 

 tion of cosmic and psychic history for subjective consciousness; 

 (6) Enlightened return to a Rationalism critically established by 

 the inclusion of the preceding elements, and by the sifting and the 

 grading of the Fundamental Concepts through their behavior when 

 tested by the effort to make them universal. In this way, the 

 methods fall into a System, the organic principle of which is this 

 principle of Dialectic, which proves itself alone able to establish 

 necessary truths; that is, truths indeed, judgments that are seen 

 to exclude their opposites, because, in the attempt to substitute the 

 opposite, the place of it is still filled by the judgment which it aims 

 to dislodge. 



And now, with your favoring leave, I will read the excerpt from 

 my larger text. 



The task to which, in an especial sense, the cultivators of philo- 

 sophy are summoned by the plans of the present Congress of Arts 

 and Science, is certainly such as to stir an ambition to achieve it. 

 At the same time, it tempers eagerness by its vast difficulty, and the 

 apprehension lest this may prove insuperable. The task, the officers 

 of the Congress tell us, is no less than to promote the unification of 

 all human knowledge. It requires, then, the reduction of the enor- 

 mous detail in our present miscellany of sciences and arts, which to 

 a general glance, or even to a more intimate view, presents a con- 

 fusion of differences that seems overwhelming, to a system never- 

 theless clearly harmonious, founded, that is to say, upon uni- 

 versal principles which control all differences by explaining them, 

 and which therefore, in the last resort, themselves flow lucidly from 

 a single supreme principle. Simply to state this meaning of the task 

 set us, is enough to awaken the doubt of its practicability. 



This doubt, we are bound to confess, has more and more impressed 

 itself upon the general mind, the farther this has advanced in the 

 experience of scientific discovery. The very increase in the multi- 

 plicity and complexity of facts and their causal groupings increases 

 the feeling that at the root of things there is "a final inexplicability " 

 total reality seems, more and more, too vast, too profound, for us 

 to grasp or to fathom. And yet, strangely enough, this increasing 

 sense of mysterious vastness has not in the least prevented the modern 

 mind from more and more asserting, with a steadily increasing in- 

 sistence, the essential and unchangeable unity of that whole of things 

 which to our ordinary experience, and even to all our sciences, appears 

 such an endless and impenetrable complex of differences, yes, of 

 contradictions. In fact, this assertion of the unity of all things, under 



