volumes of published books and of posthumously edited lecture notes are but a specimen of what such men have produced. A prominent English philosopher was flippantly accused, a few years since, in a gay and irresponsible volume of reminiscences, of having been the writer of books that, as the scoffing author in substance said, “fill several yards on the shelves of our libraries.” The prominent philosopher indignantly responded, in a letter addressed to a literary weekly. “His critic,” said he, “was recklessly inaccurate.” As a fact his own collected works, set side by side on a shelf, cover a little less than two feet! How vast the toil, then, and on the other hand, to what end? A distinguished German student of the history of philosophy, Friedrich Albert Lange, upon one occasion, wrote these words: “Once for all we must definitely set aside the claim of the metaphysicians, of whatever school and tendency, that their deductions are such as forbid any possible strife, or that if you only first thoroughly come into possession of every detail of some system six fat volumes long, then, and not till then, you will recognize with wonder how each and every individual conclusion was sound and clear.” Does not this assertion of Lange’s, this definitive setting aside of the claim of the metaphysicians, seem warranted by the facts? What one of these systems, six fat volumes long, has ever satisfied in its entirety any one but the master who wrote it, and the least original and thoughtful of his pupils? What so pathetic, then, in this history of scholarly production, as this voluminous and systematic unpersuasiveness of the philosophers? They aimed, each one in his own private way, at the absolute, and so, if they failed, they must, you will think, have failed utterly. Each one raised, all alone, his own temple to his own god, declared that he, the first of men, possessed the long-sought truth, and undertook to initiate the world into his own mysteries. Hence it is that so many temples lie in ruins and so many images
