Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/352

 338 A. K. ROORES I further the coming of the kingdom of truth." So also Prof. Jones : " A system of philosophy must fail if it is faithful to its datum ; it must perish with the life 1 it explains, though it perishes only as that life does, namely, in such a way as to enter into the larger life which succeeds it ".- No doubt there is truth in all this. The content of reality is revealed to us in experience, and philosophy cannot hope to outstrip history, and gather in the wealth of meaning which only the future will reveal, but must be content to interpret life as it conies. But then philosophy has never pretended that it was its business to exhaust the content of life, but only, in so far as it aims to make any absolute state- ment, to determine the nature of reality in its general outlines. And in this sense I do not see how we can escape the result that it is philosophy's task to transcend its immediate practical value and discover absolute truth. We are deter- mining reality thus absolutely when we call it the process of experience, quite as much as when we postulate a meta- physical existence beyond the human experience which is known to us. To claim that the business of philosophy is to interpret for us the immediate situation and not, to tell us about the nature of absolute truth as a matter of theoreti- cal knowledge, seems to me suicidal ; it would practically confine us to the bare moment, and would take away all that we mean by the truth of any philosophical theory, including our own. In reality there is no reason why the two things should be incompatible. I can use my philosophy to inter- pret the present demand of life upon me, just because it is a theory of reality as a whole, of real existence beyond the present, with reference to which the present can be placed and understood. Each new experience will undoubtedly alter the content of reality for us, and so the task of inter- pretation is an endless one, which each generation has to perform for itself ; nevertheless, it is the necessary ideal of philosophy to make this growing task the filling in of a general conception of reality as a whole which is regarded as true, not a mere advance to some indefinite goal of which we can say nothing except that it will never be reached. No interpretation of the past and present would be possible if we could not in some degree see these in the light of the whole which transcends them. Hegelianism has no special advantage, therefore, in the fact that it insists upon the functional value of philosophy ; 1 MIND, vol. v., p. 534. Ibid., vol. ii., p. 166. Cf. p. 161, and especially Uewey, Tin- tii : i canci' of the Problem of Knowledge.