given the world the noblest, most hopeful, useful, and influential systems of ethics. Philosophical training gives the power to view comprehensively, connectedly, and logically any group of facts. It contains the presuppositions of science and of our very existence. The investigator in the forest learns many valuable details; if he ascends the mountains, he views the landscape as a whole, and, as it were, finds himself. Finally philosophy represents the supreme, the spiritual, interests of man and aims at essential truth.
Will it be relegated to the shelves of archæology? The signs of to-day appear to answer no. In the whole history of philosophy, the mind has never been able to rest permanently in any extreme or one-sided position or in any position that is inadequate to explain essential facts of existence. Hence it cannot rest permanently in materialism. A recent writer speaks of the history of philosophy as "preëminently a record of remarkable returns of the human intellect to ancient follies and dreams, long since outgrown and supposed to have been consigned to oblivion." Well! It is strange indeed if nature has evolved a product whose needs, instincts, and native beliefs are a lie, a product without aim or rational ground for existence. If it is so, then pessimism is our philosophy and annihilation our best solution of the problem of conscious life. Most men are too respectful believers in evolution to ascribe to nature any such satanic irony.
At any rate one likes to take an excursion in this field; he feels benefited by the trip. Men still like to seek the great fountain head of philosophy, and take a dip in the Castalian spring—a mental bath of
