The business of philosophy is “to think things together,” so far as the reality of things and the capacity of thought allow. That reality presents many contrasts, physical, ethical, metaphysical, light and darkness, life and death, good and evil, right and wrong, the One and the many, the Infinite and the finite, the Eternal and the temporal, and what we mention as last, but not least, for our immediate purpose, Being and Becoming, the Constant and the Contingent. The contrasts need (...) not be regarded as contradictions, negations one of another, as thought the Eleatics with their emphasis on Being, or the Heraclitics with their preference for Becoming. To our immediate scrutiny all stands and all flows may be irreconcilable oppositions; but Einstein is teaching us that there is relativity in all our interpretations of reality. We need not with Indian thought declare Brahma alone real, and all else Maya , illusion. (shrink)

The meaning of the word philosophy, “love of wisdom,” the dominant interest of Socrates, the developments of Greek philosophy in Epicureanism and Stoicism, Kant's reliance on the practical reason as a clue to reality—all justify the direction of attention in this essay from the abstract theoretical to the concrete practical aspects of thought. Not that the two can or ought to be separated from, or opposed to one another; for human personality is a unity, and theory and practice must act (...) and react the one on the other. The familiar saying: “More harm is wrought for want of thought than even want of heart,” indicates that in moral activity under-standing of consequences is no less necessary than goodness of intention or motive. The preacher who declared that he was an Agnostic in mind, and a Christian in heart, if he really knew himself and was not deceiving himself with a rhetorical phrase, was in a perilous and unsatisfactory state of mental equilibrium. (shrink)

In his greatest work the greatest thinker of his era, if not of all time, Plato, writing in one of the greatest, if not even the greatest epoch in the intellectual, artistic, and literary history of mankind, held up a mirror not only to his own age but to every age, not least our own, in the glowing radiance of his unsurpassed genius. This essay is an attempt to look on the world around us with his searchlight. Addressing on this (...) subject a select company of educated and intelligent men and women, I discovered that several of them had attempted but had failed to read through The Republic . They could not see the wood for the trees, lost their way, and gave up the guest. (shrink)

It is a commonly accepted view that men think to live, and do not live to think, that conation, and not cognition, is the primary object of living. Impression, affect, and expression constitute the complete psychic process. The term philosophy, the love of wisdom, also suggests that man's thought has a practical and not a theoretical objective. In this connection, however, two errors must be avoided: on the one hand an exaltation of the intellect as in rationalism, and on the (...) other hand a depreciation of the intellect as in pragmatism. (shrink)

The poet’s words: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp” are not merely a command of whatought to be, they are a description of what is. Man has always been stretching himself beyond his own measure. He has a sense of the Infinite: Eternity has been set in his heart: he has not been content to look only on the things seen, his gaze has ever been towards the Unseen. Whatever stage of development he may have reached, he seeks for, (...) and strives after, what is above and beyond himself and his world. In science he tries to get behind thephenomenalreality as his senses apprehend it, to thenoumenal, mind. In philosophy he endeavours to bring the multiplicity of his experience, outer and inner, into a unity that will evidence itself to his reason as coherent, and not contradictory. In morality he is not content with the customs and standards of the society of which he is a member; but conscious of their inadequacy, he conceives and aspires to realize an ideal adequate to his nature; hisought to beis always challenging hisis. The impulse or motive of progress in all spheres of human interest and activity is “the best is yet to be.”. (shrink)

Introduction: Religion and morality; from faith to fact -- I. Historical -- II. Ethical -- III. Psychological -- IV. Sociological.