way which this defect has required me to follow. Faith
has its glories; but the hard toil of critical reflection
brings its own rewards. None prize the home-coming
more than those who wander farthest.
I
My first task, in the present lecture, is to indicate in what spirit the Theory of Being, to whose definition and defence the former series of these lectures was devoted, is hereafter to be applied to the treatment of the more special problems of experience and of life. Our Theory of Being had especially this character, namely that it did not undertake to demonstrate a priori what particular facts we should meet with anywhere in the world, but that it did undertake to show us a certain method whereby we ought to proceed in attempting to estimate those facts, to interpret them, to find what rank they held in the realm of Being. People come with false expectations to philosophy when they expect it to furnish them any substitute for special science, any peculiar power to anticipate the particular results of experience, any intuitive capacity to see in the finite world facts that other methods of inquiry have not made evident. For the primary purpose of a Theory of Being is not thus to discover what special finite beings are real, but to interpret the sense in which any fact whatever can be real. Its application, therefore, does not come in advance of experience. On the contrary, it is a critical study of the meaning of experience, which it therefore presupposes. And we are now to endeavor to find of what nature such applied Philosophy may be.
