read Spinoza, or Schopenhauer, or John Stuart Mill, or Bergson, or James, or Bowne, you know what they mean; or at least, if you do not, you have to admit that it is your fault, not the philosophers’. But if you read Plotinus, or Kant, or Fichte, or Hegel, or many contemporary writers, you have to struggle through a barrage of jargon before you can begin to penetrate their positions. Their terminology is much more cumbersome than it need be. There is, as Berkeley says, “a great number of dark and ambiguous terms.” Yet, objections to the literary form of philosophical writing are only superficial. They are much the same as the objections that a European makes to Chinese food; or that a dyed-in-the-wool conservative makes to change: namely, that he is not used to it. The real trouble with philosophy is not a matter of words. The calculus cannot be put in words of one syllable; all rigorous thinking demands a technical vocabulary.
§ 3. THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY
The difficulty about philosophy, then, arises not alone from the language that philosophers use, but from the very nature of what philosophy is. Philosophy may be defined as the attempt to think truly about human experience as a whole; or to make our whole experience intelligible. The world is its parish. Everything in the universe, which in any way enters into human experience, or affects, or is known by human beings, is of interest to philosophy. Now the universe is inexhaustible. Any fact in it may be studied from many different points of view; new facts have a way of cropping up every second; the understanding of any fact involves our taking into account its relations to all
