In the next place, take my advice, and do not read Elements and Outlines. You may be sure that this advice is quite disinterested, because I have written Elements myself. Get to the great writers. Go to their own works, for philosophy is really not a dogma, not a system of doctrines. It is a way of looking at the world of knowledge and experience which you can best acquire by trying to put yourself in the position of a great mind which has consciously adopted it.

Do not be alarmed at the multitude of philosophers and philosophies. It does not really matter much which of the great writers you take up-Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Green. The man who refuses to read a particular philosopher because he does not give us "philosophy," Hegel said, is like the man who refuses to take cherries or pears because they are not "fruit." There is no such thing as philosophy in general, any more than there is fruit in general.

You may begin really with any. There is none of them, we may admit, that has a divine origin, and is infallible; and, as Socrates says in the Phado, when we cannot get a divine discourse to sail in, as in a ship, we must take the best human discourse that is open to us, and, greatly daring, sail on it through life as upon a raft.

The last thing that suggests itself to me is: Do not suppose that, in order to live and think philosophically, you require to think about things that you find in the philosophical text-books. Do not, e.g., think that it is necessary to follow "the dance of bloodless categories" that Hegel leads us in his Logic. Here, also, it does not matter where you begin. Listen to what Nettleship, whose Remains I quote again, says

on this: "If I had to begin over again, I should like to try to master the elements of a few big things. Till I have done this, the rest is all confusion, and talking about it is beating the air. And whenever I at all understand the elements, I seldom find much difficulty in finding applications everywhere. Anything presents every kind of problem; and I can't help thinking that it would be much better for many metaphysically minded people if they would think about things which they happen to feel and have real experience of, instead of taking their subjects and lines of thought from other people's systems."

"Anything," he says, "presents every kind of problem." All roads lead to Rome; all subjects followed far enough will take us to the centre. They lead to the Whole; and philosophy is really only a particularly determined attempt to follow out the path of knowledge or experience that any one of us happens to have chosen for himself.

II.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM WALLACE.1

THE

death of Professor Wallace in February made

a great blank among English philosophers. It is one more added to the list of similar losses which the present generation has suffered. W. K. Clifford, T. H. Green, R. L. Nettleship, and now William Wallace. If all these were "happy in the opportunity of their death," inasmuch as they died before any of their natural force was abated, and yet not before they had given evidence of the maturity of their thought, just for that reason we have the more to regret, for we know what we have lost.

As one who had the privilege of reckoning himself among the comparatively small number of Wallace's intimate friends, I may, perhaps, be permitted here to say how great is our personal loss. None who knew him will ever forget the splendid simplicity of his character. It seemed a stroke of irony that he should have been a University professor. No professor was ever less professorial, and it was often difficult to realise in private that he was one of the most learned men of our time. No man-or, at any rate, no University man -ever laid less store by external distinctions. This freedom from conventionality he owed to the large fund of genuine humour which he possessed. He has himself described the kind of humour that goes to the 1 Fortnightly Review, 1897.

making of a philosopher in the highest sense-“ the humour, viz., which strides over the barriers set up by institution and convention between the high and the humble, and sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by a half-grim, half-jubilant Ananke." This kind of humour he himself possessed in no small measure. He was a fellow-countryman of Burns. He valued men and women for what they are. His standard was character. All else, wealth, rank, college honours, were but the guinea stamp-if they were even that-the man was the man for a' that. Even distinctions deeper than those he is thinking of in the above passage, such as those of genuine learning and culture, seemed to be little to him. What he has said of Jowett was true of himself in a striking degree: "He bore in upon his pupils and friends the conviction that beyond scholarship and logic there was the fuller truth of life, and the all-embracing duty of doing their best to fulfil the amplest requirements of their place."

But it is as a lecturer and writer on philosophy that he is generally known, and here we all feel that a teacher of peculiarly ripe scholarship, of extraordinary insight, and very marked individuality, has passed away from us.

To those who live in London his figure has not been unfamiliar for some years past, when he has come to lecture at Toynbee Hall or at the London Ethical Society. The tall and somewhat gaunt outlines, the earnest and thought-worn expression, the perfect mastery of material and language which enabled him to speak for usually over an hour without note or reference, and yet without a slip, the graphic and humorous illustrations, must have stamped themselves

In the next place, take my advice, and do not read Elements and Outlines. You may be sure that this advice is quite disinterested, because I have written Elements myself. Get to the great writers. Go to their own works, for philosophy is really not a dogma, not a system of doctrines. It is a way of looking at the world of knowledge and experience which you can best acquire by trying to put yourself in the position of a great mind which has consciously adopted it.

Do not be alarmed at the multitude of philosophers and philosophies. It does not really matter much which of the great writers you take up-Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Green. The man who refuses to read a particular philosopher because he does not give us "philosophy," Hegel said, is like the man who refuses to take cherries or pears because they are not " 'fruit." There is no such thing as philosophy in general, any more than there is fruit in general.

You may begin really with any. There is none of them, we may admit, that has a divine origin, and is infallible; and, as Socrates says in the Phado, when we cannot get a divine discourse to sail in, as in a ship, we must take the best human discourse that is open to us, and, greatly daring, sail on it through life as upon a raft.

The last thing that suggests itself to me is: Do not suppose that, in order to live and think philosophically, you require to think about things that you find in the philosophical text-books. Do not, e.g., think that it is necessary to follow "the dance of bloodless categories" that Hegel leads us in his Logic. Here, also, it does not matter where you begin. Listen to what Nettleship, whose Remains I quote again, says