human experience. But now something more than a wireless telegraphic communication, with messages of friendly interest, is being established between the two. The Earth and Jupiter are not now moving in opposite directions; neither are they rushing at each other in a way to set both ruinously on fire. Indeed, this figure of speech seems quite inadequate pictorially to represent the happy occasion of the near future. The two worlds may discover that they are indeed but one; and that both must interpenetrate and harmonize in a way to make one world that shall be fit to engage and satisfy the 'over-man.' Or to render more truly social, by completely changing our figure of speech: There may be a wedding in prospect between the reals of science and the ideals of art, morals, and religion ; and if the wedding takes place, philosophy must perform the ceremony up to the point of pronouncing the benediction.
This conception of the reconciling mission of philosophy, as an affair of the greatest theoretical moment and practical worth, merits further elucidation in several particulars. For the very conception implies a number of considerations which should not be allowed to escape our attention at the present time. In large measure the spirit, and in a considerable degree the method, of Kant will serve the present student of philosophical problems as well as it served him. But even Kant's critical spirit needs to be enlarged, and the critical method not a little modified so as to make it, on the one hand, more thorough, and, on the other, less narrow ind artificial. Meanwhile the material, or 'stuff,' which must be, if not wrought into, at least thoughtfully considered in relation to every modern attempt at systematic philosophy, has enormously increased. No matter, then, how much we may honor the author of the Critical Philosophy, and no matter how much we may make acknowledgement of the modern world's indebtedness to him, we cannot in any true and comprehensive meaning of the phrase, 'go back to Kant.' Philosophy must go forward, or she can never fulfill her mission for the twentieth century as she fulfilled that mission in the eighteenth century,—chiefly toward its close by the patient, life-long labors of the great thinker of Königsberg.
