Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/39

Rh willing to look at the world from many sides, fearless as to the examination of what seem to be even danoerous doctrines, patieat in listening to views that look even abhorrent to common sense. It is useless to expect a simple and easy account of so paradoxical an affair as this our universe and our life. When you first look into philosophy you are puzzled and perhaps frightened by those manifold opinions of the philosophers of which we have thus far had so much to say. “If they, who have thought so deeply, differ so much,” you say, “then what hope is there that the truth can ever be known?” But if you examine further you find that this variety, better studied, is on its more human side largely an expression of the liveliness and individuality of the spiritual temperaments of strong men. The truth is not in this case “in the middle.” The truth is rather “the whole.” Let me speak at once in the terminology of a special philosophical doctrine, and say that the world spirit chose these men as his voices, — these men and others like them, and that in fact he did so because he had all these things to voice. Pardon this fashion of speech; I shall try to make it clearer hereafter. Their experience then, let me say, is, in its apparently confusing variety, not so much a seeing of one dead reality from many places, but rather a critical rewording of fragments of the one life which it is the destiny of man to possess and to comprehend. These warring musicians strike mutually discordant tones. But let each sing his song by himself, and the whole group of Meistersänger shall discourse to you most excellent music. For grant that the philosophers are all in fact expressing not dead truth, but the essence of human life, then because this life is many-sided, the individual expressions cannot perfectly agree. It is the union of many such insights that will be the one true view of life. Or again, using the bolder phrases, let us say that all these thinkers are trying to comprehend a little of the life of the one