"Our life is but a little holding, lent To serve God's aim; else die we with the sun." But you will readily recognize the oracles of both these. seers as dubious and at best only half correct; for neither has any inkling of the scientific and philosophic truth that his words darkly adumbrate. Similarly Tennyson tells us, "the individual withers, and the world is more and more."* But the truth they miss is that cosmic history is the process of unfolding, of growing, a psychic experience that passes on up to consciousness and to self-consciousness and does not stop there but expands and ascends ever wider and higher to universal self-consciousness, to the realization of the world-selfhood, the identity of the individual with the universal, a consciousness that transcends death, because it removes the bonds and the bars of which death is the sign. There is nothing Utopian, nothing visionary in the prospect here set forth; it is in line, as we have seen, with all the surest teachings of the austerest science. A hundred illustrations lie at hand, but only one have you patience to hear. When a one-celled organism splits in two, we must suppose the physical fact images some psychic process of too low an order for us to name, something most distantly akin to a feeling, to the mother-instinct of a bird or a dam that flutters in agony about her brood or defends her offspring with her own life. Perhaps it is thence a still farther cry to the intense love of the human mother, who loses her very being in her child and finds herself again therein and hardly less in her grand-children and even in remoter descendants. Now as this lofty triumphant feeling of love is an absolutely uninterrupted outgrowth from the nameless subsub-feeling in the single cell, unless we make the impossible * Especially notable in this connection is the allegory of Mr. Herbert Trench, Apollo and the Seaman. supposition that history is to call a halt in its forward march and henceforth retire or spin round in a circle, it must be that this feeling will grow as the ages roll on, into higher and higher super-feelings that shall identify the life of its descendants, that shall expand and intensify the parent consciousness and the parent love unendingly through all generations to come. Such is only one of a million paths along which the enlarging consciousness pursues its steady and unceasing march toward the infinite and immortal world-consciousness which is its heavenly goal. Even as a wave of the sea issuing from a pebble thrown into it spreads wider and wider till it compasses the whole sphere and gathers itself up in the opposite pole. "Reflection," says the Dhammapada, "is the path of immortality; thoughtlessness is the path of death." We must amend the wisdom of the Indian sage. It is consciousness that is the path not so much of immortality as of eternality; not mere narrow self-consciousness, but the consciousness of the larger Self that eradiates over the Whole and sees and feels that it is itself the world and that its fellows are each of equal right the world. Herein lies no contradiction, for the modern doctrine of the infinite, grounded by Bolzano and developed by Cantor, Dedekind, Keyser and others, shows clearly how the parts of an infinite may each equal the whole. Such then is the path to immortality, the way to eternal life. Not indeed a narrow path, but the wide-expanding sweep of advancing consciousness, which flashes upon us here as science and there as art and yonder as democracy and liberty and equality and justice and culture and morality and self-sacrifice and virtue and truth and love and everywhere as philosophy, the guide of life. All of these, by no means excluding the lower but no less essential aspects of trade and commerce and industry and wealth and amusement and social enjoyment, all are but manifold phases of the brightening, ex panding, ascending individual consciousness that more and more will burst all bounds, above, below, and uplift itself to the Universal and Eternal Whole. Of course there are many objections you could urge, not many perhaps that have not already been pondered. But these would require the introduction of a new order of notions, for which there is now no time. Enough that a rational interpretation of cosmic history opens before our eyes an increasing prospect for humanity, a vista that broadens and brightens unto perfect day. WILLIAM BENJAMIN SMITH. TULANE UNIVERSITY, NEW ORLEANS, La. PREDICAMENTS IN PHILOSOPHY. ROFESSOR Lovejoy's address before the Philosoph "something was the matter with philosophy" and returned to criticism and discussion as the way out of the difficulty. It offered nothing constructive in the solution of the problem. "Criticism" is only a euphemism for scepticism, and while scepticism is a necessary weapon in that field, it is not the method of making philosophy. Philosophy began under the discovery of illusions and scepticism was the means of discovering and exposing them, but it was not the method employed by such men as Plato and Aristotle in their constructive work. There are three functions which philosophy can perform, two of them not being adequately distinguished from each other and not occupying as much attention since Kant and Hume as the first one. They are (1) Criticism, (2) the Acquisition, and (3) the Communication of knowledge. Criticism is the means of breaking up dogmatism and stagnant ideas in our thinking. Acquisition explains itself, while we too often forget the difference between it and the conditions for communicating what we have acquired. Criticism adds nothing in content to knowledge. It only demands clarification and perhaps certitude, though it does not supply it. Communication adds nothing, but transmits what has been acquired, while acquisition is the means of discovery and addition. I cannot enter into the analysis of the problem of "knowledge" at any length. That would take us far into epistemology and it is only a part of the general problem with which we are concerned here. But I must call a brief attention to the equivocal import of that term, a fact which neither Kant nor Hamilton seemed to have noticed, or to have sufficiently allowed for, if they did notice it. The term "knowledge" has two very different conceptions for which it does duty. The first is unity and the second is certainty. Or the first is unification, classification, relation, and the second is certification, certitude, assurance. If we can only keep these apart in our discussions, we would quickly come to agreement in our problem. But we are perpetually confusing them and committing fallacies as evident as in the paradoxes of Zeno about motion. Hamilton defined knowledge as relation and Herbert Spencer followed him. It was easy to see in this conception why he denied any "knowledge" of the Absolute. It was not comprehensible in terms of a higher genus. It was not classifiable, or unified with a more general concept. It was the summum genus itself. But Hamilton sought certitude for the fact of the Absolute in Faith, and this was opposed to "knowledge," an opposition quite clear on his definition, but absurd on the definition that "knowledge" implied certitude. Hamilton, however, while correct as to the scholastic use of the term "faith" did not see that it, too, was equivocal. It did duty for the most certain thing in consciousness and also for the most uncertain things, namely, dogmas that required proof or some means of certification. Hence the attack of Mill upon him without discovering exactly what Hamilton was after. If Hamilton's doctrine had not been invoked in the defence of theology it might have been either disregarded or admitted as harmless. It was at least perfectly logical and irrefutable as reasoning on his premises. The point of criticism should have been |