or Spinoza’s; you must define it by its distance from Kant’s; you must refute your rival’s view by identifying it with Protagoras’s.  Thus does all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed.  Everything you touch is shopworn.  The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is appalling.  It comes from too much following of german models and manners.  Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you will hark back to the more humane english tradition.  American students have to regain direct relations with our subject by painful individual effort in later life.  Some of us have done so.  Some of the younger ones, I fear, never will, so strong are the professional shop-habits already.

In a subject like philosophy it is really fatal to lose connexion with the open air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop-tradition only.  In Germany the forms are so professionalized that anybody who has gained a teaching chair and written a book, however distorted and eccentric, has the legal right to figure forever in the history of the subject like a fly in amber.  All later comers have the duty of quoting him and measuring their opinions with his opinion.  Such are the rules of the professorial game—­they think and write from each other and for each other and at each other exclusively.  With this exclusion of the open air all true perspective gets lost, extremes and oddities count as much as sanities, and command the same attention; and if by chance any one writes popularly and about results only, with his mind directly focussed on the subject, it is reckoned oberflaechliches zeug and ganz unwissenschaftlich.  Professor Paulsen has recently written some feeling lines about this over-professionalism, from the reign of which in Germany his own writings, which sin by being ‘literary,’ have suffered loss of credit.  Philosophy, he says, has long assumed in Germany the character of being an esoteric and occult science.  There is a genuine fear of popularity.  Simplicity of statement is deemed synonymous with hollowness and shallowness.  He recalls an old professor saying to him once:  ’Yes, we philosophers, whenever we wish, can go so far that in a couple of sentences we can put ourselves where nobody can follow us.’  The professor said this with conscious pride, but he ought to have been ashamed of it.  Great as technique is, results are greater.  To teach philosophy so that the pupils’ interest in technique exceeds that in results is surely a vicious aberration.  It is bad form, not good form, in a discipline of such universal human interest.  Moreover, technique for technique, doesn’t David Hume’s technique set, after all, the kind of pattern most difficult to follow?  Isn’t it the most admirable?  The english mind, thank heaven, and the french mind, are still kept, by their aversion to crude technique and barbarism, closer to truth’s natural probabilities.