to our Latin memories. Italian humanism was the resurrection of a distant and unfamiliar world; Anglo-Saxon humanism is the announcement of a new world, still unfamiliar, but no longer distant: a world in which the soul is master. And this explains Schiller's interest in psychic problems and his membership in the Society of Psychical Research, which has made him a member of its council.[1] It explains also why he is one of the most prominent exponents of pragmatism as embodied in James' doctrine of the Will to Believe, which is simply one of the means of rendering true the beliefs that most concern us.
Schiller's philosophy is by no means new. Beyond his direct sources—the most important of whom is certainly William James, the full extent of whose influence on contemporary thought cannot yet be fully estimated—one may rightly enough go back to the famous aphorism of Protagoras ("Man is the measure of all things") which so scandalized the ingenuous soul of Plato. Saint-Martin, the philosophe inconnu, set this phrase at the head of one of his works: "Il ne faut pas expliquer l'homme avec les choses mais expliquer les choses avec l'homme." Schiller might have chosen a still more daring motto: "Il ne faut pas soumettre l'homme aux choses, mais
- ↑ See his article on Human Sentiment as to a Future Life, in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, XVIII (October, 1904), 416–50.
