world where courage is in place as well as reverence, and sport as well as seriousness; where, above all, the genius of reflection, expressing at once vast experience of life and a certain infantile cheerfulness or even sportiveness of mood, rightfully lets itself loose in the freest form, now assuming a stern and critical air, now demurely analyzing, as if there were nothing else to do, now prying into men’s hearts like a roguish boy playing with precious jewels, now pretending that all faith is dead, now serenely demonstrating unexpected truths, and, last of all, plunging back again into life with the shout of them that triumph.
VI.
It now behooves me, in conclusion, to say something of the relation of a course of lectures like the one herewith begun to the technicalities of philosophical study. There is a great deal in every noteworthy metaphysical treatise which can be grasped only by special study. I shall make little attempt to transgress into this more technical field during these lectures. I must, indeed, discuss topics which only a rare kindliness on your part can make clearly comprehensible, for they are, once for all, serious and difficult, but I do not understand it to be the purpose of our present discourse to give what in the University would be called an Introduction to the literature of metaphysics proper. The only question that can arise about such a proceeding as I here propose is, of course, a question as to whether it is worth while to separate the general consideration of philosophical tendencies from a more minute study of the works of the philosophers. Such a question only the outcome can decide. I am aware that it is hard to be historically accurate in what I have to say without being much more specific than I shall have time to be. I must warn you at the outset that a full and fair understanding of any great thinker demands a knowledge, both of the history of thought in general, and of his own period
