Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel--I prudently avoid
names nearer home!--I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these
names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal
ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways
of taking the universe were actually true. We philosophers have to
reckon with such feelings on your part. In the last resort, I
repeat, it will be by them that all our philosophies shall
ultimately be judged. The finally victorious way of looking at
things will be the most completely IMPRESSIVE way to the normal run
of minds.
One word more--namely about philosophies necessarily being abstract
outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings
that are FAT, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines
of buildings invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and
compass. These remain skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone
and mortar, and the outline already suggests that result. An outline
in itself is meagre, truly, but it does not necessarily suggest a
meagre thing. It is the essential meagreness of WHAT IS SUGGESTED by
the usual rationalistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their
gesture of rejection.
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