Not one step in this process is logical, yet it is the way in which monists and pluralists alike espouse and hold fast to their visions.  It is life exceeding logic, it is the practical reason for which the theoretic reason finds arguments after the conclusion is once there.  In just this way do some of us hold to the unfinished pluralistic universe; in just this way do others hold to the timeless universe eternally complete.

Meanwhile the incompleteness of the pluralistic universe, thus assumed and held to as the most probable hypothesis, is also represented by the pluralistic philosophy as being self-reparative through us, as getting its disconnections remedied in part by our behavior.  ’We use what we are and have, to know; and what we know, to be and have still more.’[1] Thus do philosophy and reality, theory and action, work in the same circle indefinitely.

I have now finished these poor lectures, and as you look back on them, they doubtless seem rambling and inconclusive enough.  My only hope is that they may possibly have proved suggestive; and if indeed they have been suggestive of one point of method, I am almost willing to let all other suggestions go.  That point is that it is high time for the basis of discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened up.  It is for that that I have brought in Fechner and Bergson, and descriptive psychology and religious experiences, and have ventured even to hint at psychical research and other wild beasts of the philosophic desert.  Owing possibly to the fact that Plato and Aristotle, with their intellectualism, are the basis of philosophic study here, the Oxford brand of transcendentalism seems to me to have confined itself too exclusively to thin logical considerations, that would hold good in all conceivable worlds, worlds of an empirical constitution entirely different from ours.  It is as if the actual peculiarities of the world that is were entirely irrelevant to the content of truth.  But they cannot be irrelevant; and the philosophy of the future must imitate the sciences in taking them more and more elaborately into account.  I urge some of the younger members of this learned audience to lay this hint to heart.  If you can do so effectively, making still more concrete advances upon the path which Fechner and Bergson have so enticingly opened up, if you can gather philosophic conclusions of any kind, monistic or pluralistic, from the particulars of life, I will say, as I now do say, with the cheerfullest of hearts, ’Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, but ring the fuller minstrel in.’

NOTES

LECTURE I

Note 1, page 5.—­Bailey:  op. cit., First Series, p. 52.

Note 2, page 11.—­Smaller Logic, Sec. 194.

Note 3, page 16.—­Exploratio philosophica, Part I, 1865, pp. xxxviii, 130.

Note 4, page 20.—­Hinneberg:  Die Kultur der Gegenwart:  Systematische Philosophie.  Leipzig:  Teubner, 1907.