"Swift to my use in the trenches where my wellplanned groundworks grew

I tumbled his quoins and his ashlars, I cut and reset them anew.

Lime I had from his marbles, burned it, slaked it, and spread,

Taking or leaving at pleasure the gifts of the humble dead.

"Yet I despised not or gloried; yet as we wrenched them apart

I read in the razed foundations the heart of that builder's heart.

As he had risen and pleaded, so did I understand

The form of the dream he had followed by the face of the thing he had planned.

"When I was a king and a mason, in the open noon of my pride

They sent me a word from the darkness; they whispered and called me aside.

They said, "The end is forbidden'; they said, "Thy use is fulfilled;

Thy work shall be as the other's, the spoil of a king that shall build.'

"I called my men from my trenches, my quarries, my wharves, and my sheers;

All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years;

Only I carved on the timber, only I wrought in the stone

After me cometh a builder. Tell him, I too have known!"

APPENDIX I

ON THE MEANING OF THE TERM

W

PHILOSOPHY

HEN these lectures were delivered I was asked by two or three persons what the word philosophy really meant. This is a much easier question to ask than to answer. A study of the definitions and the illustrative passages given in the Oxford Dictionary leads one to the conclusion that the English word philosophy can be used in as many different senses as Mark Twain found for the elusive German word Zug; which, as he truthfully remarked, could mean anything from a bank check to a railroad train. Under such circumstances each man may, within certain broad limits, choose his own definition. A philosophy, as I understand

it, is a set of working hypotheses which a man adopts in order to harmonize, as far as may be, his prejudices with his experience.

There are certain ideas or prejudices which we accept without proof and take as starting points in our own reasoning. It is in this manner that we assume our own existence, the existence of other people like ourselves, the reality of an external world of some kind, and an underlying orderliness in the events of that world. None of these things is capable of proof, in the ordinary sense of the term. The Cogito ergo sum of Descartes does not represent the real reason for believing in a man's own existence. It is simply a means of making a belief which we already possess appear logically plausible. I know of no better name by which to call these assumptions than the old and somewhat abused term innate ideas. They

are based on inherited habits of action and thought, which have lasted throughout so many generations that they have become unconscious if not instinctive. They represent prejudices rather than reasoned judgments regarding the universe; and they exemplify in a striking degree that superiority of prejudice over reason which Burke so cogently set forth.

Side by side with these innate ideas or prejudices there gradually come into our lives other ideas which we acquire consciously as the result of teaching and observation. Our own experience of everyday life and the truths of history and science which we learn from others supplement our preconceived notions of the universe, and as we grow older begin to conflict with them. Out of this conflict comes a readjustment of our prejudices. No man, however strong his innate ideas, holds them in quite the same form at thirty