Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/29

4 into the most problematic regions of theory. And in the present course, especially in the earlier lectures, I shall still be busy with highly theoretical issues, and I shall still appeal, above all, to my fellow-students. But we have now won the philosophical right, and have become subject to the practical obligation, not only thus to follow out our theoretical interests, but also to show how the philosophy set forth in our earlier lectures stands related to the more immediate problems of life. I shall devote the present lectures, in the main, to considerations that, however abstract they may seem, are meant to help us towards an interpretation of Man’s place in the universe; and I shall be guided by a determination to attempt, before I am done, a definition of man’s nature, duty, and destiny. The former lectures emphasized the World; the present course shall be directed towards an understanding of the Human Individual. The previous discussion dealt with the Theory of Being; the aim of what is to come shall be a doctrine about Life. This doctrine will still belong to philosophy; but its outcome shall have to do with the practical interests of Religion.

The order which has so far been followed is, indeed, as I must hold, the only order for a student of philosophy. Therein, if you please, is just where lies the practical defect of philosophy, — viz. in that it can only reach the civilized realm of our daily business by the way of the wilderness of solitary reflection; that it must first, to use Emerson’s word, meet God in the bush, so that only later, and painfully, it learns to find him in the mart and the crowded street. I confess the defect. I want to show also some of the excellencies of the very