or the typical personality? And if not, what becomes of a 'growth of the soul'? To this we must admit the impossibility of any complete, or even approximate, answer with our present knowledge. We can only note one or two points of certainty or of confident belief. The first, that there have been individual men, an Aristotle or a Shakespeare, in the past, with whom later ages never have, and perhaps never may, compare. The second, that there are good grounds for thinking that the average man has improved in goodness and in knowledge since we first knew him dimly in the dawn of history. But more important and more certain is the fact that the collective soul of man has grown, and all the extensions of knowledge and of power of which our volume speaks bear witness to it. They are essentially social in origin and outlook, and rest on a foundation of common thought immeasurably wider than any in the more distant past. The man of science, the statesman, even the poet, now speaks for a multitude, and out of a multitudinous consciousness, which had not gathered to support, to inspire, or to weigh down, an Aristotle, a Pericles, a Cromwell. This is a dominating fact from which it is well to take our start. Assuredly the soul of mankind has been collectively enlarged and enriched. How far the individual can share in this enlargement is still one of the problems of the future. The West has committed itself to a general policy of education which aims at making every citizen a full partaker in the advance of the race. But it cannot be said that this policy has yet been really tried. It is the acknowledged ideal to which in all Western countries partial steps have been taken, and the democracy, through their most enlightened leaders, will continue to press for its fulfilment. As this approaches, the individual may become more and more in his degree the microcosm which philosophers have proclaimed him, and the enlargement of the soul, which we know to be a fact for humanity, will become a fact for every man. Need we doubt that with the general raising in the level new eminences will appear? Do not great mountains sometimes rise from the sea and sometimes from the high plateau? We are now in the very midst of a struggle for settlement and incorporation, which, as it is accomplished, should prepare the way for new excellences of every kind. What may not be hoped of men if once they learn to live with their fellows? And they can only so learn by studying them. This is felt by all contemporary writers from Bergson in philosophy to Graham Wallas in politics. Poets and novelists, above all, have turned more and more to problems of the inner life. The novelists who ushered in our age are significant of this, and none more so than George Eliot, whose work, though somewhat out of fashion for the moment, is yet marked by the transition from Victorian complacency to modern unrest and modern hopes. Full of love and appreciation for the old order in England-the contentment and humours of the country-side, the difference of classes, the respect for religion-she was carried by the evolutionary philosophy of her time into thoughts of an eternal and world-wide order, the growth of humanity, the kinship of man with the universe, the social nature of duty. Her contribution was essentially psychological; she enlarged our knowledge of the soul. She showed us, not certainly more living types than Scott or Dickens, but more play of motives, more varied interests in life, more mental crises. The soul, above all the woman's soul, had widened its horizon between Flora Macdonald and Dorothea Brooke. Every reader will think of famous novelists who have followed the same broadening path, and their work is often really great as well as famous. The history of thought has in fact throughout the last century been a commentary on those words of Keats to which many of us have turned of late for comfort and inspiration: 'The world is not a vale of tears, but a vale of soulmaking.' Tears there are in abundance, as the tears of children. But sorrow is not the leading note of children, nor should it be of humanity in growth. Soul-making— the practice and the theory-has become more and more clearly and consciously the object of human thought and endeavour. We need the greater mind to see the links in the overwhelming mass of science, in the mazes of human action and history. We need it still more to grasp and to preserve the unity of our social life. Most of all for the healing of the world is the greater soul needed, with a world-consciousness, some knowledge, some sympathy, some hope for all mankind. Without this, a league of nations would be dead before its birth. The recent development of psychology, social as well as individual, its pursuit on scientific lines, and its alliance with biology, suggest one thought which applies generally to an age of science and may be found to throw some illumination even on the future. Which of all types of modern men is the most habitually hopeful, the man of letters, the politician, the business man, or the man of science? There can be no question of the answer. The typical man of science is sure of the greatness and solidity of the work he shares, and confident that the future will extend and make still more beneficial its results. His forward glance is more assured because the backward reveals a course of growing strength and continuous ascent. The physicist foresees unmeasured sources of energy, still untapped. He warns us of our dangers, but has no doubt that, with due foresight, we may overcome them, and make the reign of man upon the planet wider and firmer than before. The doctor knows no disease which may not in time yield to scientific treatment. The agricultural expert foresees, and can produce, new types of grain and fruit which will surpass the best yet known. And the trainer of youth, the man to whom the new science of psychology stands most in stead, is the most hopeful of them all. Dealing with human nature in its growth he puts no limits to its powers of goodness and activity. He deplores the want of wise methods in the past, and if he errs at all it is in an excess of optimism, in believing that with new methods we may make a new man. On this enlargement of the soul, enlightened by science, we build the future. It is the crowning vision of the modern world, first sketched by Descartes, filled out and strengthened by the life and thought of three hundred years. In the interval we have lived much and learnt much, both of our own nature and of the world in which we live. In our own age a powerful stimulus has been given by a transformed biology and a new science which shows the soul itself in growth from an immemorial past, moulding the future by its own action, surmounting, while assimilating, the mechanism which surrounds it. But for this building two things are needed. One, that our souls, as builders, shall act as one with all our fellows and strive for unity as well as power. The other, that in the building the laws of growth shall be followed, which science has already revealed in part and will reveal more fully. For the spirit of science is the spirit of hope. II PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR A. E. TAYLOR BETWEEN forty and fifty years ago a great European man of science, Emil du Bois-Reymond, delivered before an audience of the leading scientific men of Germany a famous discourse on The Limits of our Knowledge of Nature, which he followed up some years later with a second discourse on the Seven Riddles of the Universe. His object was to convince the materialists of the 'seventies that there were at least seven such unsound places in their story of everything. Some of the riddles', he admitted, might prove to be soluble as science advances, but the most important of them will always remain unanswered. Our position as regards them will always be ignoramus et ignorabimus-we do not know the solutions and we never shall know them. I do not ask now whether du Bois-Reymond was right in his judgement or not. If he was right, that means, of course, that the one tale of everything will never be told by human lips to human There will no more ever be a finally true Philosophy than there will ever be a finally perfect poem or picture or symphony. But there is no reason why we should not, at any rate, try to make our story as nearly perfect as we can, to reduce the number of the places where we have to break off with 'that is another story', and perhaps even to hazard a wide solution' in matters where absolute certainty is beyond our reach. This is the work of human Philosophy as I conceive it, and ears. |