Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/657

NO. 4.] conception of what this meant under my circumstances in those days. For it was not the reading of Helmholtz, or Fechner, or Weber, or Wundt, that led me to the study of this subject; it was the interest in the subject which led me to the study of these authors. And inasmuch as no dictionary was then available, not infrequently it was necessary to translate the German roots into the corresponding Greek roots, in order even to know the meaning of the terms in anatomy and physiology.

From the psychological and the historical points of view, and after reading, without the systematic bias of the 'disciple,' many books, and taking scores and finally hundreds of mature pupils with me over the ground year after year, I came to form tentative or more or less final opinions on most of the principal problems of philosophy. This is simple historical fact; and it squarely contradicts Assistant Professor Macintosh's characterization of me and my work.

But there is a wider interest involved in all this than anything purely personal can possibly be. In the same book (p. 8) I am called a 'dogmatist.' Whether this designation should be passed back to the writer whose disciple I am declared to be, I am not interested to inquire. The name 'dogmatist' has a comical sound as applied to one who for two-score years has been attacked as a rationalist, and sometimes denounced as a very dangerous and heretical rationalist. But the way in which either name is customarily employed is usually mischievous to the cause of honest and clear thinking. To divide and subdivide, and pigeon-hole, and label, after the fashion of the book from which I have quoted, gets no whither in the direction of improving the substance or the history of reflective thinking. And it is particularly to be deprecated in a "School of Religion" at a time when the graduates into the ministry are being less and less looked up to by the great body of the intelligent and the thoughtful among the people, as trusted teachers of the truths which they are especially commissioned to teach.

At Princeton University Dr. H. C. Longwell has been appointed Assistant Professor and Preceptor in Philosophy, and Dr. Donald W. Fisher, Instructor in Philosophy. Mr. Bertrand Russell of Trinity College, Cambridge, has been convicted under 'the defence of the realm act.' Under these circumstances the English Government finds it impossible to issue a passport to him to leave the country. Accordingly, his lectures at Harvard, which were to be given next spring, must be postponed until another year. Professor Royce will resume his own course on Symbolic Logic. We give below a list of articles in current philosophical magazines.

, XXVII, 2. W. S. Foster and K. Roese, The Tridimensional Theory of Feeling from the Standpoint of Typical Experiences; Arthur J. Todd, Primitive Notions of the Self; George