that for a season have disputed the field with them. Now it must be confessed that such is not the case in philosophy. Philosophic theories resist classification in terms of success and failure. The ascendancy of one does not mean loss of prestige on the part of its rival. Like the history of science, the history of philosophy is one of hostile and seemingly incompatible hypotheses, but the field of battle, fortunately or unfortunately, is not strewn with corpses of theory. The war of philosophic systems looks to the casual observer like a bloodless war. The struggle for existence among them is certainly not marked by any absence of violence and fury, but not mortal are the wounds which the combatants inflict one on another. The strife seems interminable, with no casualties and no victories. It is the endless and fruitless conflict of philosophic opinion that lends not a little justification to the disdain in which philosophy is held, particularly among men of science, as a subject of no practical or tangible consequences. Philosophy, they say, is indecisive. It gets nowhere. It moves in a circle. What is the result of philosophic speculation for the last two thousand years? Is not its history a record of unsolved and apparently insoluble problems? Is it not a repository of the same typical questions and the same typical answers with the same typical contradictions discernible in all of them?

I am moved to lay stress so strongly upon the apparent fruitlessness of philosophic speculation in contrast to the positive triumphs of natural science in order to show that it is a problem with which the professional student of philosophy is not unfamiliar. I beg leave to quote a passage from William James's well-known essay on "The Will to Believe," where the consciousness of this problem is voiced with such impressive candor. "For what a contradictory array of opinions," exclaims James, have objective evidence and absolute certainty been claimed! The world is rational through and through-its existence is an

ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God-a personal God is inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately known-the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative exists-obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent spiritual principle is in every one-there are only shifting states of mind; there is an endless chain of causes there is an absolute first cause; an external necessity-a freedom; a purpose-no purpose; a primal One-a primal Many; a universal continuity-an essential discontinuity in things; an infinity-no infinity. There is this-there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false.

The philosopher is but too well aware of the passion with which, in the name of truth, thinkers have been wont to champion diametrically opposed views. But this situation may be exploited for positive as well as for negative comments upon the meaning of philosophy. The question why philosophers disagree so fundamentally and so ceaselessly may terminate in more than one answer.

Within philosophy itself, it must be frankly admitted, the attitude toward differences of opinion frequently encountered is that of a narrow and militant dogmatism. But it is an attitude, I hasten to say, not at all peculiar to philosophy. Its temper is general. Its spirit is pervasive. And breathes there a man completely immune from it? It consists in believing, with or without formulated reasons, that but one opinion or one set of opinions is true, from the point of view of which, all other ideas that contradict it may be stigmatized as false and condemned as heretical. In religious matters, to be sure, we no longer, speaking with Montaigne, set a high value on our opinions to roast men on account of them, but in these days it is dangerous to entertain political or economic heresies. Some ideas there are the holding of which may lead to serious consequences. Men are still punished for ideas. They are punished for believing what from the point of view of a given and established doctrine appears as false and therefore nocuous.

Is

this unintelligible? Not at all. Granted the indubitable truth of an opinion-be the opinion religious, political, economic, aesthetic, moral, or scientific-then whatever contradicts it is erroneous and obnoxious. Toleration of false ideas, provided you are convinced of their falsity, indicates a want of earnestness about truth. He who loves the truth will fight the wicked enemies that 'assail it. This is human, is it not? The only trouble with it is that men differ so about what they take to be the truth, and that one man's God is another man's devil. But the genuine dogmatist is he who is quite certain of being in possession of the only true ideas, and who is equally certain that all the ideas opposed to them are false, and are to be disparaged and repudiated. Of such exclusive and militant dogmatists, no sphere of human interest and activity is without its numerous and vociferous representatives. The dogmatic temper being so human and so universal, we should not be surprised to find it omnipresent in philosophy. Indeed it is there that the spirit of dogmatism is most rampant, because philosophic opinions more than any others are supposed to lend themselves to reasoned proof and sustained demonstration. Convictions about philosophic matters, so it is alleged, are impelled not by personal taste or social tradition but by rational necessity and logical consistency. A particular system of ideas, therefore, is by its protagonists earnestly proclaimed and stoutly defended simply because such a system alone is held to satisfy the demands of human experience and of pure reason. It is this which generates the spirit of controversy. The exclusive claim to be in conformity with truth burdens every system of philosophy with the necessity of exhibiting the fundamental errors in its opponents. And where truth is held to pertain to but one system of ideas, many schools of thought claiming to be infallible in the certitude of possessing it, the incessant war of philosophic doctrines is as inevitable as the past

strife of religious dogmas, or as the present conflict of economic and political creeds. It belongs to the pathos of human civilization that from the point of view of the dogmatic adherents to any one system of ideas all those that deny its exclusive validity should appear as the blind foes of the only true faith. But, as a recent writer pertinently remarks, "If all schools of thought but one are fundamentally in error-as nearly everybody thinks in every age-would it not be a miracle that one should escape the common lot?"

Yet, dogmatism in the face of conflicting issues in philosophy as well as in the presence of antagonistic ideas elsewhere is determined by the human necessity of choice between alternative possibilities. Where possibilities present themselves for choice, as they do in all human affairs, and where preference for one of them is not blind or instinctive, the decisive factor is a potent conviction that what is chosen is good and what is rejected is evil. In matters of preference it seems impossible to avoid partisanship. To prefer means to be partial. We are most partisan, strange as it may sound to say it, when the grounds on which we justify our choices seem to us to partake of impeccable rationality. Where our choices appear as the result of rational necessity, we cannot help believing that the possibilities rejected by us are incapable of being preferred by our opponents for reasons as cogent as those which impelled our own preferences. The recognition of the equal adequacy of the choices of our opponents would be fatal to our own. Because our opponents choose what we reject, we are prone to impugn to them logical or moral motives inferior to our own. Our antagonists must be wicked or stupid, so we naturally assume, to subscribe to what we condemn as so patently false. But there is another alternative. It is the insight that views contradicting our own may be the co-eval with them in cogency or in the lack of it. The insight that either all human

preferences are somehow capable of justification or that none of them may lay claim to finality or infallibility begets a skeptical defiance of the spirit of dogmatism not only in matters philosophical, but in others as well.

The skeptical rejection of any view which makes pretense to finality or infallibility is, in philosophy, associated with the name of agnosticism. It is an attitude of which a certain dread is almost universal. For it is generally regarded as destructive of the very end which is supposed to confer meaning upon the philosopher's quest, the quest of certitude. The aim of philosophy, so it is felt, cannot be the vindication of permanent doubt. The majority of philosophers will thus be found solidly arrayed against agnosticism. As a method or instrument of constructive speculation, skepticism is not without a certain prestige. But it is considered merely a potent stimulus for the vigorous thinker, a spur to reflection, a challenge to be met and overcome. Thus the chief merit of skepticism seems to consist in its eventual suicide. That skepticism is something to be finally escaped from is a conviction almost axiomatic. No wonder then that agnosticism, being skepticism rendered consistent, is looked upon as a low form of philosophy lacking in depth and dignity, over which, because of its so-called "constructive" or "positive" character, almost any kind of dogmatism appears to have the advantage. Yet one may ask whether agnosticism, so frequently maligned, is not an attitude the profound aspect of which is obscured by those who uncritically take it for granted that it is evil to doubt the possibility of identifying final or infallible truth with any system of human ideas. In philosophic literature agnosticism occupies a position not unanalogous to that of pessimism. Pessimism, too, is regarded as a challenge, as something to be transcended. A philosophy that terminates in pessimism is interpreted as negative and destructive, and