of the sunlight they strive to hide. It is this spiritual recoil against the pressure of evil that draws from Wordsworth some of the loftiest and purest notes which his music ever reached, notes in which the minor tones of sorrow the means of expressing a deeper joy : "Sighing, I turned away; but ere A ritual hymn, Chanted in love that casts out fear By Seraphim." are made THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE PRESENT TIME.1 IN complying with the request which you have done me the honour to make, to deliver the introductory address to this Society, I think that, instead of treating of any special philosophical subject, it will be more profitable to make some general remarks on the nature and objects of the study to which the Society is devoted. I propose, therefore, to say something as to the general problem of philosophy, and the special forms which that problem has taken in recent times. In doing so, it will not be possible for me to avoid an appearance of dogmatism, as I must make some assertions which are much disputed, the objections to which I shall not have 1 An Introductory Address, delivered to the Philosophical Society of the University of Edinburgh, 1881. time to discuss. cheap formulas of modesty, I venture simply to make this apology once for all, and to ask you to adopt, for the time, a point of view which may not be your own. Afterwards you can avenge yourselves for this temporary submission by subjecting my words to what criticism you think fit. A philosophic temper is shown, above all things, in the power of entering into the views of another, and taking them for the moment almost as if they were your own, without prejudice to the subsequent critical reaction, which will be effective just in proportion to the degree of your previous sympathetic appreciation of the ideas criticised. But instead of interpolating any What, then, is the task of philosophy? What is its task in general, and how is that task modified by the circumstances of the present time? To the first of these questions, I answer that, stated in very general terms, the task of philosophy is to gain, or rather perhaps to regain, such a view of things as shall reconcile us to the world and to ourselves. The need for philosophy arises out of the broken harmony of a spiritual life, in which the different elements or factors seem to be set in irreconcilable opposition to each other; in which, for example, the religious consciousness, the consciousness of the infinite, is at war with the secular consciousness, the consciousness of the finite; or again, the consciousness of the self, with the consciousness of the external world. It is easy to see this, if we reflect on the nature of the controversies which most trouble us at present. They all, directly or indirectly, turn upon the difficulty of reconciling the three great terms of thought,—the world, self, and God: the difficulty of carrying out to their legitimate consequences what seem to be our most firmly based convictions as to any one of these factors in our intellectual life, without rejecting in whole or in part the claims of the others. Thus, for example, many writers in the present time find it impossible to admit the truth and solidity of the principles and methods of physical science in relation to the material world, without extending their application beyond that world. Yet, if we make this extension, and treat these methods and principles as universal, we inevitably reduce consciousness, thought, and will, to the level of physical phenomena, and make even their existence an insoluble problem. Others, again, find it difficult to assert the truth, that the consciousness of self enters into all our experience, without reducing that experience to a series of states of the individual soul. And others, like Mr. Spencer and Professor Huxley, poised between these two conflicting currents of thought, have adopted the odd, and we might even say irrational, expedient of telling us that we may regard the world either as a collection of the phenomena of mind, or as a collection of the phenomena of matter, but that we can never bring these two ways of looking at things together—a view which supposes man to be afflicted with a kind of intellectual strabismus, so that he can never see with one of his mental eyes without shutting the other. Again, looking beyond this conflict of materialism and subjective idealism, the intellectual unity of our life is disturbed by the opposition of the consciousness of the infinite to the consciousness of the finite. To many of our scientific men it seems axiomatic that all our real knowledge is of that which belongs to the context of a finite experience, and that all religious and metaphysical efforts to reach beyond the finite are attempts to think the unknown and unknowable. Yet such men often feel strongly the need, and, N |