moments, the result is perhaps a serious talk with a friend, or nothing more noteworthy than an occasional hour of meditation, a dreamy glance of wonder, as it were, at this whole great and deep universe before you, with its countless worlds and its wayward hearts. Such chance heart searchings, such momentary communings with the universal, such ungrown germs of reflection, would under other circumstances develop into systems of philosophy. If you let them pass from your attention you soon forget them, and may then even fancy that you have small fondness for metaphysics. But, none the less, all intelligent people, even including the haters of metaphysics, are despite themselves occasionally metaphysicians.
II.
All this, however, by way of mere opening suggestion. What you wish to know further, through this introductory lecture, is, how this natural tendency to reflect critically upon life leads men to frame elaborate systems of philosophy, why it is that these systems have been so numerous and so varied in the past, and whether or no it seems to be true, as many hold, that the outcome of all this long and arduous labor of the philosophers has so far been nothing but doubtful speculation and hopeless variety of opinion. I suppose that a student who knows little as yet of the details of philosophic study feels as his greatest difficulty, when he approaches the topic for the first time, the confusing variety of the doctrines of the philosophers, joined as it is with the elaborateness and the obscurity that seem so characteristic of technical speculation. So much labor, you say, and all thus far in vain! For if the thinkers really aimed to bring to pass an agreement amongst enlightened persons about the great truths that are to be at the basis of human life, how sadly, you will say, they seemed to have failed! How monstrous on the one hand their toils! Hegel’s eighteen
