sense of disgrace and rebellion, "bitterly ashamed," as a friend of mine has expressed the same feeling in my hearing, "bitterly ashamed to find myself living in a universe whose truth could possibly be made so inefficacious and uninteresting." To be sure, in saying all this I am far from desiring to make technical metaphysics easy, for the study is a laborious one; and there are many topics in logic, in the theory of the sciences, and in ethics, to whose comprehension there is no royal road. But then, once your eyes opened, and you will indeed find subjects that at first seemed dry and inhuman full of life and even of passion; as, for instance, few sciences are in their elementary truths more enticing to the initiated, more coy and baffling to the reflective philosophical student, in fact, more romantic, than is the Differential Calculus. But if such matters lie far beyond our present field, I mention them only to show that even the hardest and least popular reflective researches are to be justified, in the long run, by their bearings upon life. LECTURE II. THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY; CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD; ILLUSTRATION BY MEANS OF THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF SPINOZISM. OUR general purpose in these lectures has now been defined. As we pass to the study of certain representative modern thinkers and problems, the difference between our method and that of a text-book, or of a regular course of academic lectures on the history of modern thought, must be well borne in mind. We wish to select certain tendencies especially characteristic of the spirit of modern philosophy. We shall therefore lay most stress upon what happened in the culminating period of modern thought, that from Kant to Schopenhauer, — and upon the problems that seem to me most permanent and significant in that period itself. In earlier periods our method will be one of the briefest sketching. Later we shall become more specific. Of no thinker before Kant shall we give any extended account. Several thinkers of first rank, such as Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, we shall barely mention or wholly ignore. Always, even where we are fullest in statement, we shall select those aspects of the thinker in question that concern our own undertaking. What this undertaking will lead to will not become manifest until, in the second part of our course, we have suggested in outline a certain philosophical creed to which I wish to direct your attention. It is in vain that one seeks, in the history of thought, to choose any perfectly satisfactory place of beginning for the purpose of a course of lectures like this. Always one must run a risk of producing the illusion in your minds that the point where he chances to begin is somehow peculiarly significant as a beginning. But always, of course, if you should ever hereafter come to look deeper, you would find this point of beginning very arbitrary, and what immediately preceded it vastly important for the true understanding of the whole matter. My beginning, therefore, as I must warn you, will be indeed very arbitrary, just as my methods will have to be very different from those of a text-book. I. As to the general scope of our course, modern philosophy, our topic in what follows, is as wealthy and complex an evolution in its way as is the life which it depicts. What we call modern thought, in these matters, is a very recent affair, dating back only to the seventeenth century. Since then, however, philosophy has lived through several great periods, which for our purpose we may reduce to three. The first period was one of what we may call naturalism, pure and simple. It belongs almost wholly to the seventeenth century. The philosophy of this first age lived in a world where two things seemed clear: first, that nature is full of facts which conform fatally to exact and irreversible law, and second, that man lives best under a strong, a benevolently despotic civil government. The philosophers of this time had left off contemplating the heaven of medieval piety, and were disposed to deify nature. They adored the rigidity of geometrical methods; they loved the study of the new physical science, which had begun with Galileo. Man they conceived as a mechanism. Human emotions, even the loftiest, they delighted in explaining by very simple and fundamental natural passions. There is often something merciless and cynical about their analysis of many things |