“ No one can deny that such a formulation would fit in well with the lingering thoughts of every World's Fair visitor. Whoever wanders through the aisles of exhibition palaces and sees amassed the marvelous achievements of industry and commerce, and the thousand practical arts of modern society, may indeed turn most naturally to a gathering of scholars with the question, "What have you to offer of similar import?" All your thinking and speaking and writing, are they merely words on words, or do you also turn the wheels of this gigantic civilization? ”

“ A mere heaping up of disconnected, unshaped facts begins to disappoint the world; it is felt too vividly that a mere dictionary of phenomena, of events and laws, makes our knowledge larger but not deeper, makes our life more complex but not more valuable, makes our science more difficult but not more harmonious. Our time longs for a new synthesis and looks towards science no longer merely with a desire for technical prescriptions and new inventions in the interest of comfort and exchange. ”

“ By my voice, the native country of Columbus, of Galileo, of Michelangelo and Raphael, of Macchiavelli and Volta, salutes and with open arms hails as her hopeful daughter young America,—thanking and blessing her for the road she has opened to the sons of Italy, workmen and artists, to civilization, to science, and to modern research and thought. ”

“ Like the mathematician, the philosopher deals directly with a realm of ideal truth. But to unify our knowledge, to comprehend its sources, its meaning, and its relations to the whole of human life, these aims constitute the proper goal of the philosopher. In order, however, to accomplish his aims, the philosopher must, indeed, take account of the results of the special physical science; but he must also turn from the world of outer phenomena to an ideal world. For the unity of things is never, for us mortals, anything that we find given in our experience. You cannot see the unity of knowledge ”

“ In the first place, it must be borne in mind that it is the same world with which the plain man, the man of science, and the metaphysician are concerned. We cannot partition off the external world to the plain man, the atoms and ethers to the man of science, leaving the metaphysician in exclusive and solitary possession of the world of consciousness. It is the same world for all. The metaphysician cannot shift the physical world, with its oceans and icebergs, its vast planetary systems and milky ways, on to the shoulders of the physicist. ”

“ So, as accord is the aim and the essence of our reason, we are caught in the snare of monism, pluralism having apparently become the equivalent of chaos, and thus the bête noir of rational metaphysics. Nay, in the opposed camp itself, some of the most ardent adherents of pluralism, the liveliest of wit, the most exuberant in literary resources, are the abjectest believers in the hopeless disjunction and capriciousness of the plural, and hold there is a rift in the texture of reality that no intelligence, "even though you dub it 'the Absolute,'" can mend or reach across. ”

“ Every science, even history and philosophy, are instances of it. What constitutes a knowledge ought to be as definite and precise a question as could be asked. That logic has made no more progress than it has in the answer to it appears to be due to the fact that it has not sufficiently grasped the significance of its own simplicity. Knowledge has been the important business of thinking man, and he ought to be able to tell what he does in order to know, as readily as he tells what he does in order to build a house. And that is why the Aristotelian logic has held its own so long. ”

“ Neither the plain man nor the cultured man, if he happens not to be tinctured with science, finds his world a duality. The things he deals with are the realities, and it is only when his naïve realism begins to break down before the complex demands of his growing life, that the thought occurs to him that his world may be more complex than he has dreamed. It is clear, then, that the distinction of our world into phenomena and ground, on which science so largely rests, is a first product of reflection, and not a fact of observation at all. ”

“ And we may say at once that only if we submit and approve and change and transcend in an over-individual act, do we have Truth and Beauty and Morality and Conviction. If we approve, for instance, a given experience in an individual will-act, we have simply personal enjoyment and its object is simply agreeable; if we approve it in harmony with other individuals, we reach a higher attitude, yet one which cannot claim absolute value, as it is dependent on historical considerations and on the tastes and desires of a special group or a school or a nation or an age. ”

“ Does not the biologist also prepare the achievements of modern medicine, does not the mathematician play his most important rôle in our mastery over stubborn nature, do we not need language for our social intercourse, and law and religion for our practical social improvement? Yes, is there any science which has not directly or indirectly something to contribute to the practical development of the modern man and his civilization? All this is true, and yet the perspective of this truth, too, appears at once utterly distorted if we take the standpoint of science itself. ”

“ In the same way it was not enough for science to penetrate a hundred exhibitions and turn the wheels in every hall, but it must also seek to concentrate all its energies in one spot and show the cross-section of human knowledge in our time, and, above all, its own methods.
An exhibition of scholarship cannot be arranged for the eyes. The great work which grows day by day in quiet libraries and laboratories, and on a thousand university platforms, can express itself only through words. Yet heaped up printed volumes would be dead to a World's Fair spectator ”

“ In philosophy, as in art, politics, and even scientific theory, the spirit and the opportunity of the time are more favorable to the gathering of material and to the projecting of a bewildering variety of new opinions, or old opinions put forth under new names, than to that candid, patient, and prolonged reflection and balancing of judgment which a worthy system-building inexorably requires. The age of breaking up the old, without assimilating the new, has not yet passed away. ”

“ And yet, strangely enough, this increasing sense of mysterious vastness has not in the least prevented the modern mind from more and more asserting, with a steadily increasing insistence, the essential and unchangeable unity of that whole of things which to our ordinary experience, and even to all our sciences, appears such an endless and impenetrable complex of differences,—yes, of contradictions. In fact, this assertion of the unity of all things, under the favorite name of the Unity of Nature, is the pet dogma of modern science ”

“ Whoever has clearly understood that politics and religion and knowledge and art and law come to me from the first quite differently from objects, can never doubt that their systematic connection must be most sharply separated from all the sciences which connect impressions of objects, and is falsified if the historical disciplines are treated simply as parts of the sciences of phenomena—for instance, as parts of sociology, the science of society as a psycho-physical object. ”

“ We can hardly suppose that any one generation, or even any one century, would have seen the complete substitution of exact for inexact ideas. Slowness of growth is as inevitable in the case of knowledge as in that of a growing organism. The most essential point of difference is one of those seemingly slight ones, the importance of which we are too apt to overlook. It was like the drop of blood in the wrong place, which some one has told us makes all the difference between a philosopher and a maniac. ”

“ No, the theory of functions, the theory of numbers, group theory, have a significance which no mathematician would consent to measure in terms of the present applicability or non-applicability of these theories in physical science? In vain, then, does one attempt to use the test of applied mathematics as the main criticism of the value of a theory of pure mathematics. The value of an idea, for the sciences which constitute our division, is dependent upon the place which this idea occupies in the whole organized scheme or system of human ideas. ”

“ Not only is the special genius required in the investigator not that generally best adapted to applying the discoveries which he makes, but the result of his having sordid ends in view would be to narrow the field of his efforts, and exercise a depressing effect upon his activities. The true man of science has no such expression in his vocabulary as "useful knowledge." His domain is as wide as nature itself, and he best fulfills his mission when he leaves to others the task of applying the knowledge he gives to the world. ”

“ It may often be difficult to say how far the new principles of classification themselves open the way for new scientific progress and how far the great forward movements of thought in the special sciences have in turn influenced the principles of classification. In any case every productive age has demanded the expression of its deepest energy in a new ordering of human science. The history of these efforts leads from Plato and Aristotle to Bacon and Locke, to Bentham and Ampère, to Kant and Hegel, to Comte and Spencer, to Wundt and Windelband. ”

“ In this mood, we are led to deny the reality and validity of thought altogether, when it cannot be defined in the metes and bounds afforded by Time or by Space: that which has no date nor place, we say,—no extent and no duration,—cannot be real; it is but a pseudo-thought, a pretense and a delusion. Here is the extremely plausible foundation of the philosophy known as sensationism, the refined or second-thought form of materialism, in which it begins its euthanasia into idealism. ”

“ I think it is thus in the development of humanity. Long ages may pass during which a race, to all external observation, appears to be making no real progress. Additions may be made to learning, and the records of history may constantly grow, but there is nothing in its sphere of thought, or in the features of its life, that can be called essentially new. Yet, nature may have been all along slowly working in a way which evades our scrutiny until the result of her operations suddenly appears in a new and revolutionary movement, carrying the race to a higher plane of civilization. ”

“ Our will submits itself to the world; our will approves the world as it is; our will approves the changes in the world; our will transcends the world. Yet we must make at once one more most important discrimination. We have up to this point simplified our pure experience too much. It is not true that we experience only objects and our own will-attitudes. Our will reaches out not only to objects, but also to other subjects. In our most immediate experience, not reshaped at all by theoretical science, our will is in agreement or disagreement with other wills ”