Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Metaphysical Monist as a Sociological Pluralist (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1920-12-02).pdf/5

Rh a reality more ultimate than that of its members, and a consequent sovereignty over them. .

  "A LOVER OF THE CHAIR" HILOSOPHY is philosophizing; it is the human activity of deliberate reflection, and its historic sum is the sum of the recorded expression of consciously thinking minds. Its subject is experience, nature, phenomena, being-whatever we choose; but its essence is always the same-a man's thoughtful effort to right himself in the course of his life's events, and its essence is, therefore, always imbedded within the subject. We who are by profession philosophers, or teachers of philosophy, are sometimes prone to forget that *our subject-matter is no segregated corpus of writings, narrowed to neatly debatable problems, but is, in sooth, as broad as the reach of impersonalized judgment-of any concern which a man miay have when for the moment he withdraws from his own foreground and views himself as a nature in the midst of natures. Philosophy is, in fact, a branch of literature, and, even when its consideration is of the truth, of fictive literature. Aristotle's dictum about poetry, that it is a higher and more philosophic thing than history, invites the entirely sound inference that philosophy is indeed but poetic sublimation-a transcendental personification of our simpler humanity. Not all its rigors of dialectic and mathematic method, not all its authoritarian apriorisms, its belligerent empiricisms, can quite purge it of that stain (as so many deem it) of imagery which is, in final honesty, its deeper matter. A sophisticated poetry, Pascal called metaphysics, voicing in his own way the hidden cousinship; to which should be added that the final sophistication is its recognition of the cousinship, and hence of the spreading wealth of its own domain. These reflections ensue upon the perusal of a book by a man who is neither by training nor profession initiate in the thiasus of the metaphysicians, who assumes no familiarity with its rituals, no gift for its chants. A Lover of the Chair, by Sherlock Bronson Gass,1 is the work of a humanist, untaught of the metaphysical schools (though not unillumined by the philosophers, for the light of Plato is everywhere reflected), a man professing what the straitlaced metaphysician inherently feels are the softer humanities of belles-lettres. Nevertheless, it is a work which is philosophic not only in mode, for its truly subtle art of expression is in the great in-

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1 Marshall Jones Company, Boston, 1919.

