and make of them passionate adherents.  But he who has watched the development of the American universities during the last twenty-five years must be impressed with the enormous influence which certain teachers have had in giving a direction to the philosophic thought of those who have come in contact with them.  We expect the pupils of a given master to have a given shade of opinion, and very often we are not disappointed in our guess.

It is entirely natural that this should be so.  Those who betake themselves to the study of philosophy are men like other men.  They have the same feelings, and the bending of the twig has the same significance in their case that it has in that of others.  It is no small compliment to a teacher that he can thus spread his influence, and leave his proxies even when he passes away.

But, when we strive to “put off humanity” and to look at the whole matter under the cold light of reason, we may well ask ourselves, whether he who unconsciously accepts his philosophy, in whole or in part, because it has been the philosophy of his teacher, is not doing what is done by those persons whose politics and whose religion take their color from such accidental circumstances as birth in a given class or family traditions?

I am far from saying that it is, in general, a bad thing for the world that men should be influenced in this way by one another.  I say only that, when we look at the facts of the case, we must admit that even our teachers of philosophy do not always become representatives of the peculiar type of thought for which they stand, merely through a deliberate choice from the wealth of material which the history of speculative thought lays before them.  They are influenced by others to take what they do take, and the traces of this influence are apt to remain with them through life.  He who wishes to be entirely impartial must be on his guard against such influences as these, and must distrust prejudices for or against certain doctrines, when he finds that he imbibed them at an uncritical age and has remained under their influence ever since.  Some do appear to be able to emancipate themselves, and to outgrow what they first learned.

It is, as I have said, natural that there should be a tendency to form “schools” in philosophy.  And there are certain things that make this somewhat uncritical acceptance of a doctrine very attractive.

In the first place, if we are willing to take a system of any sort as a whole, it saves us a vast amount of trouble.  We seem to have a citadel, a point of vantage from which we can look out upon life and interpret it.  If the house we live in is not in all respects ideal, at least it is a house, and we are not homeless.  There is nothing more intolerable to most men than the having of no opinions.  They will change one opinion for another, but they will rarely consent to do without altogether.  It is something to have an answer to offer to those who persist in asking questions; and it is something to have some sort of ground under one’s feet, even if it be not very solid ground.