philosophising, and for doing so he has been. called the father of modern philosophy. Scholasticism in the main rested upon authority Philosophy was used not to discover truth, but to act as a buttress to theology. Bacon did much to discredit Scholasticism, but he did not lay the foundations of philosophy. As already said, in anticipation of Comte, he confined intellectual activity to practical questions; he sought not to solve ontological or metaphysical problems, but to bring science into the service of man. Descartes gave philosophy its proper startingpoint; he began with Psychology. To the neglect of Psychology the collapse of ancient philosophy was largely due. Plato and the Greek school generally busied themselves mainly with Cosmology and Theology. Their speculations came into violent collision with Christianity, and and whatever psychological elements they contained in the form of NeoPlatonism were quietly absorbed, and the cosmological speculations swept away. Pagan speculations about the world and man could not possibly withstand truths which were supposed to be supernaturally revealed.

When Descartes took his stand upon Psy

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The

chology he created a new epoch in Philosophy. Philosophy is rooted in Psychology. The root question from which all other questions spring is this: What is the nature and validity of Knowledge? Upon Psychology and what is termed Epistemology, rest Cosmology and Ontology. It is useless to endeavour to discover the truth about the World and Being until we have discovered the nature and limits of Knowledge. student should carefully bear in mind that in differences of Psychological theory all differences among philosophers take their rise. From this consideration emerges a guiding principle in the study of Philosophy. The student who reads chronologically will find himself in endless confusion. As he watches philosophers engaged in deadly conflict, slaughtering one another's theories, he is strongly reminded of the famous battle of the Kilkenny cats, where nothing was left but certain insignificant fragments of the combatants.

An indiscriminate study of Philosophy is well calculated to produce a feeling of un

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certainty, if not scepticism. In fact, a famous writer, George Henry Lewes, wrote a History of Philosophy with the view of showing from the contradictory and chaotic results the futility of all such speculations. What is needed to counteract the sceptical feeling is method in philosophical reading. The method is this: to read not chronologically but logically. If a theory of the World and of Being depends upon a theory of Mind, then obviously the student should begin with the psychological side of Philosophy as set forth in the works of the great master thinkers. Those who desire a wide survey before settling down to a departmental study of philosophy will find the following works of great service: 'History of Philosophy,' George Henry Lewes; 'History of Philosophy,' Ueberweg; 'Handbook of the History of Philosophy,' Schwegler; 'Speculative History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century,' Morell; 'Philosophical Classics,' contributed to by distinguished writers, and published by Messrs Blackwood; 'History of Modern Philosophy,' Höffding; 'Student's History of Philosophy,' Rogers; 'Scottish Philosophy from Hutcheson to

Hamilton,' M'Cosh; "Cosmic Philosophy,' Fiske; and 'Recent British Philosophy,' Masson. The student who masters these, which are simply a selection from a vast literature, will have laid a good philosophical foundation.

CHAPTER V.

PHILOSOPHY (continued).

Two things impressed Immanuel Kant with awe the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Astronomical and ethical phenomena, awe-inspiring as they are, would have appealed to man in vain had he not been in the possession of that mystery of mysteries-Mind. In the daily hustle and bustle man gets so immersed in the secularities of life that he rarely stops to study himself. What is this mysterious something in the brain which mirrors the Universe, seeks to understand the Eternal, and to fathom the Infinite? As Carlyle puts it: "With men of a speculative turn there come seasons, meditative, sweet yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am I?'