OO a 
us see. 
‘Half the things we say are philoso- 
- wise. 
Are you a philosopher? No? Let 
Everybody is a philosopher. 
phy. They may not be true, but 
_ they are the expression of our under- 
standing of the truth, and for each 
one of us that is the only truth possi- 
& ble. 
_ for us only because we would under- 
The truth would be the truth 
stand it to be such. 
In the first place, what is a philoso- 
pher? A lover of wisdom, you say. 
Yes, quite right, All of us love to be 
We want to know as much as 
possible, It makes us successful. It 
helps us to appear to advantage in 
our daily relations with our fellows. 
This is the selfish aspect of it. We 
also want to be of real service in the 
world, to be sure, 
Of course, a man who makes a 
business of philosophy—who teaches 
it, or writes it, or preaches it, or prac- 
tises it—is supposed to be more of a 
philosopher than the every-day man. 
But the difference is simply one of 
degree. 
_ Even in the trivial things of life we 
sandwich the meat of our philosophy 
with the bread of fact. Someone 
says: “What a lovely day!” Another 
says: “Yes; how much we are crea- 
tures of the weather!” Observe any 
conversation on one topic for five 
minutes (this is unusual, to be sure) 
and three minutes of it are us- 
ually devoted to philosophy, parti- 
cularly in the case of very ignorant 
and very intelligent people, Moder- 
ate intelligence is more liable to en- 
able one to keep to the mere state- 
ment of incidents than extreme ig- 
norance or intelligence. 
Every activity has its philosophy. 
We read books on the Philosophy of 
Art, the Philosophy of Science, the 
Philosophy of Religion, the Philoso- 
phy of Education, There is a phil- 
osophy of selling, a philosophy of 
play, a philosophy of work. Philoso- 
phy itself is the philosophy of Life, 
and Life includes everything. There- 
fore, everything has a philosophy. 
We solve most of our great prob- 
lems by the application of philosophy, 
One of the most difficult problems we 
have to meet is the death of one very 
close to us. How do we doit? By 
asserting our belief in the life to 
come, when we shall meet again the 
loved one whom we have lost. That 
is the kind of philosophy that those 
whom we love most give to us. We re- 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
Everybody Is A Philosopher 
By Edward Carleton Knight 
From the Christmas Number of the Japan Review 
fuse to believe that the loved one is 
dead. We do not believe in death, 
for. all that is real is eternal. 
Therefore, the loved one has not gone 
EDWARD CARLETON KNIGHT 
at all. It is simply that our false 
sense of him has gone—that is all. 
The real man—the spiritual man— 
still lives. 
Or perhaps we are materialists. 
Our friend or our relative has gone. 
His trials are over. He is no more, 
and perhaps it is better so. His life 
was constant discord—he suffered 
loss of fortune, the ingratitude of 
friends, and constant il! health. We 
remember his kind acts, and we miss 
him. We are sorry that he has gone. 
In time we shall forget him. 
memory will pass out of our mind and 
his place will be taken by another. 
Then, again, the problem of the 
moment may be met by the philoso- 
phy of the moment, We are all prag- 
matists to that extent. We adapt 
the method to the need. But the 
method that we use is usually the 
first one that comes to mind at the 
particular moment. We do not have 
time to select the best possible meth- 
od, even though we know them all— 
or most of them. 
We have a great disappointment to 
meet. It seems as if it were too 
great for us to bear. But we stand 
up under the strain. We say that 
nothing can touch us that is not real, 
His 
3 
We say with Fichte: “God only is, 
and God is naught but life.’ The 
God in us—which is our real self— 
cannot be harmed even by us. So 
this disappointment must be only ap- 
parent and temporal. It must be 
based on false values. So we get 
over it, and find further strength 
in the energy that is released by the 
new understanding of reality. 
lf the average man could look 
ahead for ten years and see just 
what he will have to go through, he 
would not care to live to stand the 
strain. But these experiences taken 
day by day are met fairly success- 
fuily, and we persist in hanging on to 
life. ‘This life is, to this extent, a 
certainty—we know something of 
what we have to meet. And, after 
all, some of us say, “There is much 
pleasure in it, and there is real joy 
in doing for others.” 
The next life, we may say, we 
know nothing about. But we may 
feel fairly sure that it is no different 
from what may be participated in 
right here and now—except for the 
burden of this natural body. In the 
words of Rudolph Euchen, the Ger- 
man philosopher of the University 
of Jena, we may believe that, “Either 
‘there is something other and higher 
than this purely humanistic culture, 
or life ceases to have any meaning or 
value.” > 
So we set to and try to find the 
meaning of life. We find it in spirit- 
ual values, in ideas, in ideals. We 
discover the meaninglessness of a 
life devoted to materialism, to physi- 
cal pleasures, to selfishness. We do 
not need to go farther than to com- 
pare the most sensual life that we 
know with the most spiritual life 
within the range of our acquain- 
tance, to see the meaninglessness and 
the meaning of life. On the one 
hand, we see sin, disease and seem- 
ing spiritual death—a mind filled with 
revolting error; and on the other 
hand, we see virtue, health and 
spiritual life—a mind that is Truth 
itself, for it is of God, who is Truth 
in Life, 
Until we know the possibility of 
these values in ourselves, we do not 
discover the real meaning and value 
of Life. And self-realization means 
this very discovery and demonstra- 
tion of life devoted to a spiritual 
Principle and His ideas. 
Yes, we are all philosophers, And, 
more than that, we are the most pro- 
found of philosophers — metaphysi- 
cians. We learn our metaphysics in 
the cradle, as Santayana says. 
William James, that most admir- 
able of scholastic philosophers that 
America has produced, said that 
