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WHAT IS A PHILOSOPHER?

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but not philosopher. What is a philosopher? Philosopher I call whosoever, doing his own thinking, speaks wisely upon first principles. He may utter himself in his own way and approach first principles from any side he chooses :- Thales from physics, Schiller from æsthetics, Jonathan Edwards from ethics. He may write his one book, his essay, his poem, or he may elaborate a system in a dozen volumes, with First Principles and Logic and Biology and Psychology and Sociology, with caudal appendages and illustrative dissertations, this is all one so far as the essential thing is concerned, and it is the depth of insight into the distinction between truth and error, and not the extent of a system, which measures the greatness of the thinker. The philosopher may write with passion, as in the Vocation of Man, or with mathematical coolness, as in the Wissenschaftslehre. He may write in dialogues like Plato, methodical critiques like Kant, sermons like Bishop Butler, letters like Leibnitz and St. Paul, essays like Emerson, or poems like Goethe. There may be a better and a worse, forms more adequate or less, but it is not the form, but the thought, which determines the philosopher. One philosopher, of course, differeth from another in magnitude. There are great philosophers like Aristotle and Goethe, middle-sized philosophers like Mr. Lewes, and small philosophers like the sions of local pertinence which may have escaped correction, or which it seemed unnecessary to change.

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professors in the colleges outside New England who write text-books of mental and moral philosophy, and essays upon "Religion and Science," and "Agnosticism" for the magazines; and it is sometimes hard to fix the line between philosophy and nonsense, just as it is hard to say where poetry stops and who is not a poet. Men will split upon the Tuppers and Kathrinas as long as the world lasts, according to their culture and their moods. The true poet, even, -Longfellow, Job, Walt Whitman, — may, like the philosopher, choose his own form. Form is with him a thing of moment, but neither this form nor that makes or unmakes him. The beauty of the thought is the thing that determines.

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The poet or the story-teller who is no philosopher may produce that which shall seem beautiful to-day; but he who alone can continue to hold us -Shakespeare, Dante, George Eliot, Hawthorne - must have grasped something of the primal and eternal. "Were the Poet but a sweet sound and singer," says Carlyle, "solacing the ear of the idle with pleasant songs; and the new Poet one who could sing his idle pleasant song to a new air, we should account him a small matter, and his performance small. The true Poet is ever, as of old, the seer; whose eye has been gifted to discern the godlike mystery of God's Universe, and decipher some new lines of its celestial writing."

This by way of make-weight to any notion of

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

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philosophy as a particular something or other — a method, a discipline, a senior elective. This con

fusion has always existed, and chiefly men have given the name of philosophy to what has chanced to be uppermost in their own minds. In Paris University, philosophy one time consisted, for the most part, in ringing changes on the syllogism

"Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio,

Cesare, Camestres, Festino, Baroko," etc.,

or in seeing from how many points one could set out and bring up at the Athanasian Creed. Then philosophy consisted in decomposing ideas and inquiring how it is that we know anything—and this drew out much truly excellent thinking. And now it is physiological psychology, I believe, which passes for the science of sciences, salvation lying chiefly in the study of the medulla oblongata and the interior of the back-bone. This is all very good or very bad, just as we take it. Psychology and biology and the creeds all lead up to first principles, only no more than history and politics and art and everything else; and whether the physiological psychologist be a philosopher or not depends strictly upon what kind of a physiological psychologist he is. A Goethe may give us, in a sentence, far truer insight than he, in all his books, into the first principles of his own science. Philosophy is a universal, and the great philosopher is the great thinker. Dr. McCosh is not a philoso pher because his subject is The Intuitions of the

Mind, nor Noah Porter because his book is on The Human Intellect, which is, of course, not saying that they are not philosophers. Emerson's Problem and his essay on Nature do more to put the back-bone into its proper place than anything else American that I think of. Emerson and Edwards are the greatest American philosophers thus far, for they bring us nearer to first principles than any others. If a third were to be added, it must be Hawthorne.

III.

In trying to determine what a great philosopher like Carlyle teaches about first principles, we encounter, in the first place, the difficulty which we find in the study of everything great; a difficulty great according as the thing itself is great, greatest of all with the source and summary of all, nature, whence all the philosophies, which are all true in their way. The penalty which the great thinker imposes upon the world, said Hegel, is the trouble of understanding him. Most great men do not publish systems, any more than God and nature do. The system is there, and the disciple may try hand at the pigeon-holing, the corollaries, and the scholia. I suppose that nothing has been so disputed about in the world as Christ's religion, unless it be nature itself. It is because, more than anything else, it has the simplicity and complexity of

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nature.

CONTRADICTIONS.

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It adapts itself to the most diverse forms of thought and is "the despair of systematizers." The great man is many-sided, and we must dive deep for the secret of his unity.

But Carlyle, to the man who does not dive very deep, is full of contradictions as few many-sided men are. Of no great man of our own time, certainly, are so many exceptions and qualifications necessary to almost anything that we may say of him. "We read him with strange emotions," says M. Taine, of his first reading of Carlyle, “contradicting every morning our opinion of the night before. He takes everything in a contrary meaning, does violence to everything, sets down paradoxes for principles, and gives common sense the form of absurdity." At one time he writes, "Could ambition always choose its own path, all truly ambitious men would be men of letters;" and at another, "Of 'literature' keep well to the windward. In fifty years, I should guess, it will be a credit to declare, 'I never tried literature; believe me, I have not written anything.'" Now the aristocracy of England is "sorrowful and phantasmal;" and now he has "lurking a considerable hope that many of our titular aristocracy will prove real gold when thrown into the crucible." "There are," he says, "south of the Tweed, some thirty millions of Englishmen chiefly fools," and "Our American cousins have begotten, with a rapidity beyond example, eighteen millions of the greatest bores ever seen in

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