Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/152

 142 unless it takes me beyond myself. This has become the central difficulty of philosophy. It is a genuine difficulty, and yet everybody neglects it except the philosopher. Berkeley was led by an examination of this difficulty to conclude that if reality is to be assumed to be knowable, then it can be composed of nothing but thinkers and their ideas. And in this conclusion Berkeley has been followed by the whole school of the idealists, the school which has numbered among its members the most eminent thinkers of later times, and has inspired notable movements in German and English literature. Other schools have been led by an examination of the same difficulty to quite different conclusions. But this difficulty has been the crux of modern thought, and no one can hope to debate fundamental issues at all without meeting it.

Such, then, are some of the matters that at once come under discussion when one attempts to think radically and fundamentally. Philosophy is brought to these and like problems because it expresses the profound restlessness of the mind, a dissatisfaction with readymade, habitual, or conventional opinions, a free and unbounded curiosity, and the need of rounding up the world and judging it for the purposes of life.