It is just the same relation. Philosophy tries to understand, let us say, what is meant by science and art, what is meant by morality, what is meant by society and the State, what is meant by religion. And, in doing so, it helps us to realise more fully what these facts are. We, as it were, translate them into our intellectual medium. With what object? Not to get away from the facts into some pure abstract region, but to get closer to them, to make them more of facts to us, to broaden them out through understanding their bearings. Nettleship brings this view of the relation of philosophy to life vividly home to us in a fine passage in his recently published lectures by quoting Novalis's account of it. "Philosophiren," said Novalis, "ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren." To philosophize is to get rid of your phlegm, to rid yourself of what lies between you and the fact. The great realities of which philosophy treats are brought nearer to us, acquire a vividness and intimacy that they previously lacked.

Now, you may say this is a very general and abstract description, and I propose in the rest of this lecture to try to come a little nearer to the subject; and I think I shall best do so by asking, Are there any special circumstances of the times in which we live. which make this service of especial value to people who wish to live rationally and well? Such circumstances I find in some of the characteristics of the age, which it has become almost a commonplace to note. I shall mention two.

In the first place, we are frequently told that it is an age of specialisation, and everybody knows that this is true. We have all got to live, and we must live under the conditions of the time we are living

in; and one of the chief of these conditions is that we should take up something special. We have got to turn our backs on other things, and devote ourselves to one corner of reality, one bit of the world-becoming specialists, and, if possible, experts. This, of course, is a necessary and a very advantageous mode of dealing with our business, dividing labour; but it brings with it its own dangers. I do not mean that the great men, the great scientific discoverers, the great artists, novelists, religious teachers are really apt to forget that they are dealing only with a part of reality, but that the lesser leaders, and those of us who are not leaders at all, are very apt to forget it. We are apt to conceive of our bit as though it were the universe. It is from this misunderstanding that the ordinary catchwords of our time-"art for art's sake," "science for science's sake," "business is business," and such other mischievous half-truths, or no truths-come. We try to set up one feature of reality against the whole, and this has, of course, the result that what lies outside of our particular cornerour "Fach," as the Germans say—is apt to lose reality and significance; it is apt to become shadowy and unreal to us. But this is not all. By a peculiar Nemesis, a kind of irony in nature, it is not only the great whole which lies beyond our part that tends to lose significance and meaning, but our own part itself is apt to become insignificant when it is treated in this way. Art, for instance, when taken by itself and made its own object, is apt to become mere photography-perhaps something worse; science and literature are apt to become pedantry; religion is apt to become ceremony; morality mere convention; business money-making, and so on through all of

them. What is not seen to be penetrated by the life of the whole seems to lose its meaning and be emptied of reality for us. There is thus a very real need to try, while doing our best to become specialists in one branch of reality, to keep ourselves in touch with the whole to which it belongs. As Goethe said : "Sich dem Halben zu entwöhnen,

Und im Ganzen Guten Schönen

Resolut zu leben."

To do this on easy terms, and superficially, is what is commonly known as culture; to do it seriously, systematically, deeply and effectively, is what we mean by philosophy. I have distinguished between these two; but, of course, there are all degrees of culture. And culture which takes itself seriously tends to become philosophy. This was so with Goethe himself, of whom Heine used to say that he wished that he would read something else besides Spinoza ; and I suppose the greatest poets-Shakespeare perhaps excepted, who had philosophy in himself-have been also philosophers in a more than general sense.

Of course, it is very easy to mistake what I have been saying, and to ask me if I seriously mean that, in order to keep ourselves alive, in order to keep the world fresh and vivid before us, we have got to study philosophy in the technical sense. I need hardly say I do not mean that. Just as it is not necessary, in order to do public service, to do service in public— but what is essential is to do whatever service we undertake in a public spirit-so it is not necessary, in order that a life may be philosophical, to read and talk philosophy.

What I wish to press upon you is the necessity of living one's own particular life in the light of the

whole, of trying to see it from the point of view of its significance its significance for life in general. I should be sorry to think that for this purpose it is necessary to have a technical knowledge of philosophy. What is necessary is to try to live as deeply and to think as broadly and as truly of our special walk in life as possible.

This is the first point. The discontinuity, the disconnectedness, the fragmentariness of modern life make philosophy, in the sense I have been trying to explain, more or less of a necessity. The parts of life, as it were, which previously, in a more simple age, were held instinctively together, tend in the stress of modern life to fall apart; and, in order to keep them together, we have to make something of an effort. And what we propose to do in this school, as far as I understand it, is to call upon you, in connection with particular subjects, to make this effort to keep the whole before your minds.

But, secondly, and coming nearer, perhaps, to some of us, there is another feature of our time which has unfortunate results-namely, that we have all got more or less to talk and to write. This is an age of talking, and it is an age of writing; and those of us who have to bear the burden of the age in this respect, perhaps to live by talking and writing, have to get something to talk and write about. We have to get it by hook or crook, and often have not much time to get it in. The consequence is that we are apt to take up with hasty, one-sided views of things. One reason is that they are easier to get hold of. Another is that they "go down" better. But, take it as you like, there is this fatal tendency in our ideas to be one-sided and partial. This is amply illustrated in the fields of

moral philosophy itself. Justice and charity, for instance, are opposed to one another by some ethical writers. Happiness and duty is a common antithesis; the individual and the state-"Man versus the State," as Mr. Spencer puts it-freedom and government, are others. You understand what I am driving at-the ordinary antitheses we meet with in everyday literature tend to cause a certain one-sidedness in our views of things, and to keep us out of sight of the whole truth. Nor, of course, is this altogether an intellectual matter. You cannot keep ideas out of life, you cannot have one-sided thoughts, which are mere thoughts. They enter into life, and they tend to make life one-sided and disorderly.

We hear a great deal, for instance, of political corruption in America; but if we look a little closer, we see, and people who have been there tell us, that, after all, the Americans are a very honest, straightforward people. And if we ask, "How is it they let their politics get into such a mess?" we shall probably find that it is greatly the result of false theory. As a friend of mine who came back from America recently put it, "The American people are not a bad sort of people. What is wrong is not their morals, but their philosophy. They are suffering from bad metaphysics." They have got it into their heads that liberty means letting things alone; and they only get on at all because, after they have done this for a long time, and the mess that results becomes very bad, they bestir themselves, and get things put a little right.

But we do not require to go to America for the attempt to make half-truths pass current for whole truths. I noticed the other day that a duke, who was making a speech in connection with the recent County