nite and intelligent reason. Every man is a born metaphysician. Mr Johnson has defined metaphysics as an unusually stubborn effort to think clearly. The sole purpose of the study of metaphysics is to make the conception of mind as intelligent as possible and to make it rest on a real basis.

While this department has not been organized many years, we feel that it has been and is reasonably successful.

Prof. F. S. Hoffman - The first two or three weeks in philosophy are of the greatest moment. I tell my classes at the outset that there will be no recitations. I give them eight or nine topics which they can treat as they please for two weeks. Then they are rigidly examined on those topics before proceeding further. The teacher is there, not to tell them how much he knows about philosophy, but to help them to philosophize. They are to do the talking because they are to do the thinking. Each day an hour is devoted to the discus sion of the topics. At the close of the discussion, the teacher gives them his opinion, if they desire it. I advise teachers of philosophy not to write a text-book to be used in their own classes. If the men know what a teacher's views are before the discussion, they will lose their interest in it. Neither should teachers of philosophy adopt any one's method, but take suggestions from all and then adopt their own method. They should put their whole soul into their philosophy, to live by it and help their students do so. Almost anybody can be interested in philosophy, I think, if these rules are followed.

Pres. G. Stanley Hall, Clark university - I have taught these subjects for 15 years, during which time I have had occasion to change my methods several times and I think I shall have no difficulty in summing up in 15 minutes on broad lines the conclusions I feel a fair degree of certainty about. In the first place I think we should distinguish at the outset between the college study and the university study of philosophy. The college study I think should include logic, ethics, psychology, with something of the history of philosophy; and if I were to act on my personal convictions, I should place ethics first, logic next, psychology next, leaving a little history of philosophy to go into the senior year. I believe that these subjects are of such fundamental importance in the shaping of character, conduct and mental work that they should be the required subjects in all college courses. If it come to this, I would even

sacrifice English rather than any of them. Every young bachelor should have at least a rudimentary knowledge of these four fundamental philosophical disciplines.

Ethics in an undergraduate course I believe should be a very simple, direct personal matter. I think it should begin with personal hygiene, the method of getting lessons, the method of sleep, the regulation of exercise and athletics. All these matters are matters of personal ethics, they are matters of body-keeping, and the young man should be impressed with the old Latin motto that to be well and strong is the best ethics. I think also the rudiments of association ethics should be taught. This, too, is a vast field, but here as in all these subjects, the qualification of the teacher should be restraint. Do not go into those things which are less well known, do not make it an arena for discussion.

In logic I think even the logical nomenclature is important. This I have always found of great interest to young men and of great value.

In the history of philosophy I should teach the older philosophical ideas, then the modern philosophy, taking care to avoid as far as possible in an undergraduate course all questions about the ulterior question of life. I have great sympathy with the sentiment of the average trustee and the average college president that there has been too much of these things for the average undergraduate; for I have seen too many young men who have been weakened by attempting to bite off more than they could chew. I would keep the university out of the college, and I should be specially careful not to teach the history of philosophy in such a way as to teach young men to hold no opinions.

As to the university instruction in philosophy, here I agree in the main with all Prof. Schurman has said. Logic is an important discipline, but I do not know half a dozen professors of logic in the world to-day. It has an advantage in that it has a very good textbook.

I think you will find as a general rule that the best discoverers, the best investigators, are not able to tell you how they do their work. They can not give you a receipt any more than a poet can give you the receipt by which he writes his poem. In science the great advances have been made along certain lines and by specialists in those lines. In our university we have succeeded, out of five who were asked, in getting one of the younger men to consent to give us a course of six lectures in logic. He wanted to make it

three, then four, but at last consented to give us six next year. I was not able to threaten or coax any of the other four.

As to ethics in its higher ranges, here we come into very close quarters, as Prof. Schurman has well said, with the history of custom and belief in the family and association life. Ethics is a vast field. What is there that has not an ethical side? Ethics in general it seems to me is the net aggregate result of all men's knowledge, and the man who can accomplish that whole field does a vast thing. Anyone who can make in a single life any valuable additions to this vast net result of all men's knowledge is doing a magnificent thing. It seems to me that the advances which have been made in ethics within recent years have been either theoretical or else they have been in the general fields of history of custom and belief which might perhaps as well be called a branch of anthropology as ethics. As to the history of philosophy, here I think we have great and peculiar dangers. First there is the danger that the teacher of the history of philosophy may become a mere philosophizer, who will try to make Kant consistent perhaps with himself. That I do not think any one can do. It is the work in this direction that the advanced school has been called on to do. I believe it is just as vicious as it is to treat sacred writings in this minute, painful and exceedingly injurious way. Philosophy is an advantage in every life. It should be treated in all its breadth and brought home to life. Plato I am sure did all he could to bring home to the students a feeling sense of the mystery which philosophy had for him without any of its incumbrances; that he would teach it as curious. rather than as technical, in a way which would make life richer and be more helpful.

The next danger is the dogmatic danger; the danger which springs from schools. It seems to me that the moment we begin to speak of the Kant school and the Hegel school, we are in the field of dogma and not in the field of ethics. The very term signifies the love of wisdom rather than its possession. I think that the day and the method of schools in philosophy are practically past, and this danger is over I hope in this country.

The next danger in the history of philosophy seems to be the introspection danger, and here I am very sorry I must take issue with my friend Prof. Butler. I should deprecate making the theory of knowledge the basis of anything under heaven.

I have been deeply pained to see in how many cases this introspection has led to morbid consequences. I think it is a very dan.

gerone thing to lay much stress on introspection. Who of the great pere holograte would tell you how he did his work? It is impossible, and that is why a method in teaching that requires a pupil to turn about and tell how he did a thing is simply vicious. It is pulling up plante to see how they grow. It may have been a good thing for Kant to take up Aristotle's problem and to condense in a very careful treatise the results of his work, but I should like to know how muen has come out of these methods.

The experimental method of psychology is somewhat new but it has made great progress. I think it may be divided into two fields: firet the anthropological, and next the scientific part. A large portion of truth is unexplainable in method and therefore I think it is a very good exercise to send pupils into the fields and let them study the facts of the forest and know how the savage people live. There the conditions of life are reduced to the simplest forms.

I have great sympathy with the attempt to entice every teacher to analyze largely, because it draws the teacher's attention from the scholar in general to the individual child. Result, the scientific study of psychology.

There are morbid features cropping out when we are fatigued and the study of morbid psychology is very good to begin with, because certain mental features are magnified and stand out more clearly. I take my class to the insane asylum in order that they may have an illustration. I believe that psychology and ethics can be best interpreted through the study of customs, just as we study the methods. But in psychology we must carry on research. We must specialize here. There is as large a field of general agreement as in physics and chemistry, where each man recognizes the work of the other. The concensus of opinion on education is that great changes and advances have been made, and this by the psychological method and that from this education has received most of its valuable contributions.

Prof. J. G. Schurman-I am anxious to bring out one point which may perhaps have been overlooked. There is a large concensus of opinion that the philosophical sciences should be cultivated at the present day, and cultivated in a manner in which we all agree. We all agree, for instance, about the importance of psychology and the methods to be used; and although much has not been said of ethics, I think that both the last two speakers, I am certain that Pres. Hall, agree with me. We differ only as regards what some of us have called metaphysics and others have called the theory of

knowledge. Pres. Hall has come before us as the apostle of antimetaphysical positivism and specialization, and he thinks it is lamentable that our young men should sometimes, like Descartes, find all their moorings adrift. He says that we have agreed in modern times that education is important. I believe for my part that there is no aspect of the highest education which is more important than that a man once in his life should lose all his moorings and should be obliged to think out questions for himself. But I do not want to make this Convocation an arena.

I am anxious that the points of agreement should be brought out, and I repeat that we are in substantial accord on everything except in our attitude to metaphysics. Let me again describe mine: I hold that metaphysics is the science or discipline by means of which we reach some ultimate conception of nature and life which shall satisfy the demands of the understanding and so far as possible the needs of the heart. Such a discipline is to be built upon the basis of the various sciences. The facts of the material world are reduced to one or two ultimate conceptions. Ultimately we explain the material world by atoms moving in accordance with the laws of dynamics. Suppose now that the ultimate conceptions of chemistry, of biology, of psychology and of all the historical sciences have been tabulated, and if you like analyzed and critically examined. Then all I ask is that the metaphysician, with due consciousness of the magnitude of the problem before him, with a strong conviction of the merely probable character of his results, shall nevertheless be allowed to build up on this edifice a theory of the whole realm of existence. I only ask that the scientific instinct which Pres. Hall recognizes when it appears within limited spheres, as for instance, physics, chemistry, or biology, shall not be checked when it operates on the common basis supplied by all the sciences. The work is no doubt vast and comprehensive. The one man competent to do it does not exist. The nearest approach to such a man is the one who possesses all the knowledge and sciences of the day. Even with such limitations as are inevitable in this age of specialization, I do not despair either of the possibility or of the value of a more or less perfect synthesis of the results of all the sciences; and such a synthesis is what we call a metaphysical system. You may say it is a fruitless endeavor, you may say it is not worth while frittering away your time at it, but all the same it is just this problem which the greatest minds of the race have considered and will continue to consider of the greatest importance.