fines a mathematical conception (which, it says, "is from its very nature abstract") as "any conception which is definitely and completely determined by means of a finite number of specifications, say by assigning a finite number of elements." This implies that the real, the concrete, cannot be so defined, can never be fully formulated. In Wundt's words: "Reality is always fuller and richer than theory." There is within us, indeed, a constant war between the abstract and the concrete. Or, as James has suggestively put it: "Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them as individual facts." Abstract classification is often most convenient and even necessary. And yet, so-called abstract justice-a perpetual appeal to precedent-may often be the rankest injustice; for it is likely to be mere arbitrary classing, with no recognition of individual differences, and doing away with all distinctions. Its mood, as Professor James reminds us, is essentially that of the Shah of Persia, who declined, when in England, to take any 1 1 Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 674-675. interest in the Derby; for he said it was already known to him that one horse could run faster than another. Which horse was the faster was no matter. And yet it is the individual who is the reality, and not the class. If there is any fast trotting, it is not done by the genus horse, but by some particular horse. One must therefore freely grant Professor James' contention that "the obstinate insisting that tweedledum is not tweedledee is the bone and marrow of life." "Life precedes, the notion follows," says Dilthey. And the notion is always less than the full life. II. THE MIND MADE FOR RELATIONS - Enough has surely been said before, to show, also, that, just as the mind is made for action, so, too, it is made for relations. Its fundamental intellectual functions — discrimination, assimilation, and synthesis — are all relating functions, incessantly at work. And the completest intellectual counsel which can be given a man, we have seen, is: Concentrate attention upon relations. We are made for a concrete world of never-ending relations-a world in which all things are knit up indissolubly together. been made to apply this conception not only to the individual man, but to man's relation to the world, to other men, and to God. The Idea of the Organism before Hegel.The classical expression of the thought as applied to society is contained in Paul's comparison of the Church to a body, in the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians. Shaftesbury is the first philosophical writer strongly to grasp the conception, and he applies it tellingly in ethics, in his Characteristics; and he is superficially echoed by Pope. The conception emerges anew in Kant's Critique of Judgment, where it is applied especially in the sphere of the beautiful. Of Kant's successors, it was emphasized particularly by Schelling, in his conception of Art and Nature, and by Schleiermacher in his æsthetic conception of religion, in his strong sense of "moral communities," as well as in his perpetual protest against all one-sidedness. The Idea of the Organism in Hegel.- But the use of this analogy of the organism came to its climax in Hegel, whose whole philosophy it permeates. The system itself aims to be an organism, and claims as its chief justification that it is completely organic; and it strives to conceive everything organically. ९९ Its fundamental thesis-thought and being are identical-is an assertion of so close a relation between thought and being that thought may be said to be the essence of being. His dialectical method is an attempt to formulate the process of growth of an organism, so that thinking itself, as Professor Royce has pointed out, is conceived as a kind of living," and therefore not merely abstract. His thought that each man must repeat in his thinking the course of thought of the race, as the embryological series repeats the zoological, was only another application of the analogy of the organism; and he applied the conception again with special force in ethics. Even his idea of God is built upon the same analogy. It was no accident that this philosophy gave such a spur to historical study, not indeed as a mere collecting of facts, but as a rational interpretation of events in their necessary development. Hegel's system is the best illustration of the mediating character of the philosophy of our age. It has inherited the problems of the past, and seeks to mediate between the opposing solutions-to show that the faulty solutions have all arisen from conceiving the problem too one-sidedly. That III. ONE REASON FOR THE PLACE AND POWER OF ART AND LITERATURE Here lies one of the great reasons for the place and power of art. It has an ideal, but it always presents this ideal concretely. It is no abstraction. It is so far, therefore, akin to life itself, for the very problem of life is the embodying of ideals. Art and literature, therefore, make an appeal that no abstract principle or ideal can make. We can never speak in general. We can never act in general. We can never be good in general. It is all in particulars. We have no way of expressing a general principle, but by putting it into some definite concrete individual action. Now, art and literature give us always such a concrete embodiment of an ideal, and so approach the strongest of all influencesthe influence of a person. In still another way art and literature show the power of the concrete and the individual. In his lectures on Greek sculpture, Kekule called attention to the fact that the greatest works were made for some definite purpose for a particular generation, not at all with the idea of appealing to mankind in general in all ages. But the very concreteness and |