Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/28

Rh till the fertile fields and to walk in the established ways. The philosopher, in the world of thought, is by destiny forever a frontiersman. To others he must often seem the mere wanderer. He knows best himself how far he wanders, and how often he seems to be discovering only new barrenness in the lonely wilderness.

Yet if such defects are to be freely confessed, and if the philosopher even glories in them, because they are for him a part of the search for truth, the practical good sense of mankind is to be respected when it demands that the solitary labors of the seeker for truth shall in the end be submitted, not only to those theoretical tests which philosophy recognizes as, in its own domain, the only decisive ones, but also to the social and ethical judgment of practical men. The truth of a philosophy is indeed a matter for reason alone; but the justification of the pursuit of philosophy as one of the tasks to which a man’s life may honestly be devoted, requires a recognition of the common interests of all men. The frontiersman may wander; but he must some day win what shall belong to the united empire of human truth. Those are wrong who ask him merely to stay at home. He wanders because he must; and God is to be found also in the wildernesses and in the solitary places of thought. But those are right who ask that the student of philosophy shall find, if he succeeds at all, a living truth; and that the God of the wilderness, if indeed he be the true God, shall show himself also as the keeper of the city.

Now, in the former series of these lectures, appealing as a student of philosophy to fellow-students, I undertook what was, from the start, and confessedly, a wandering