fine craft of the stage, as well as poetry and humanity, is in the work of Margaret Ogilvy's son.

As the play draws to its end, critics buzz.

""The triumph of sugar over diabetes,'" says the Aristophanic Mr. Nathan.

"Moonshine, all moonshine," say the Vitalists. "Where is the REVOLUTIONIST'S HANDBOOK, and where is THE UNDERWORLD?"

"Ah, that Mother theme, now-a clear case of EDIPUS COMPLEX, say the Suppressionists.

Barrie the Pantaloon smiles and cries: "Oh, what a lark is life!" What matter, then, the heartbreak in his eyes as he turns from the footlights: ("Ring down the curtain quickly, Mr. Prompter, before we see them all swept into the dust-heap!") What matter-since he knows so surely as the day comes round another baby will crow and crow!

THE TASKS CONFRONTING A PERSONALISTIC

PHILOSOPHY

EDGAR S. BRIGHTMAN

BOSTON UNIVERSITY

PART I

We are living in an age which I am convinced is one of reviving interest in philosophy, but also one in which a clear conception of the function of philosophy is conspicuous by its absence, except, perhaps, among the absolute idealists, who have always been zielbewusst, and a group of English personalists, of whom James Ward, Sorley, Pringle-Pattison and Rashdall are the chief representatives. The mathematical logicians, the realists, the instrumentalists, and the rest, do not seem to have put their fundamental philosophical problem into definite question form. Are personalists any better off? What are the tasks confronting a personalistic philosophy in America?

The first problem, and from a practical standpoint, the most serious one, is what I may call the problem of the school, or the problem of the Bowne tradition. We may as well frankly face the fact that the great work of Bowne is at once an inspiration and a problem; an inspiration, obviously, a student whom Bowne could not inspire with amor intellectualis was fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. And also a problem and for two reasons. First, because the prestige of Bowne among impersonalists is not great; and if we are to perform our function as thinkers we must speak a language that they can understand and will listen to with respect. Secondly, because any one who is the follower of a master or of a tradition in philosophy will be conscious of the multitudes wagging their heads and crying, "Epigone, epigone."

With reference to the first of these problems, it is our task to show that impersonalists were mistaken in their estimate of Bowne and of personalism. With reference to the second, the situation is one in which it is easy, at this stage of the development of the personalistic school in America, to make foolish and fatal blunders. There is undoubtedly a prejudice against "schools." Creighton in his recent amusing article on "Philosophy as the Art of Affixing Labels" (Jour. Phil 17 (1920), 226) says that "one gets increasingly the impression that the great masters, from Plato on, are not dominated by the interests of 'schools,' but keep close to the literal ideal of philosophy as love of wisdom, and effort after insight." Royce's posthumous Lectures on Modern Idealism is even more energetic on the subject. "Hardly anything," he says, "is more injurious to the life of scholarship in general, and especially of philosophy, than the too strict and definite organization of schools of investigation. The life of academic scholarship depends upon individual liberty. A philosophy merely accepted from another man and not thought out for one's self is as dead as a mere catalogue of possible opinions. The inevitable result of the temporary triumph of an apparently closed school of university teachers of philosophy, who undertake to be disciples of a given master, leads to the devitalizing of the master's thought, and to a revulsion, in the end, of opinion." (p. 233).

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That there is a danger in all schools and traditions we may heartily agree, one that we minimize at our peril. Royce's wise words may well be taken to heart by realist (both neo- and critical), and instrumentalist, as well as by personalist. Allegiance to a philosophical or other tradition in any such fashion as to hamper individual initiative or free creativity would be calamitous so far as the intellectual life was concerned. "Ein jeder sollte nach

seiner Fasson selig werden." But I challenge the implications of Creighton's position. His whole article, with its attack on schools and labels, is, naively enough, an assertion of the preeminence of his own, the neo-Hegelian, Bosanquettian variety, school; his mood is that of a new gospel, "The logic of the concrete universal, the new Kingdom of God, is at hand." Where would the history of philosophy be but for the conscious allegiances of the great masters to their predecessors? Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus; the scholastics; the revivals of antiquity at the Renaissance, the English empiricists; the Cartesians, including Spinoza, Leibniz, and the schoolman of schoolmen, Wolff, who carried it to extremes, but yet performed no mean service to his age; the Kantians, the Hegelians, the Lotzeans. How can one survey the history without seeing that it is no record of the individual insights of unique individuals, but the cooperative labor of free men not too free to learn from others? Eclecticism has always been regarded as on a lower intellectual plane than the acceptance of some unified system; and the attitude that has nothing to learn from the past is on a still lower plane. I do not see that we need apologize for having convictions, or for believing that Bowne's fundamental insights are a permanent contribution to philosophical opinion, related as they are to Berkeley and Leibnitz, Kant and Lotze. At any rate we may escape Santayana's scourge, "How, then, should there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason, in an age when the word dogmatic is a term of reproach? "(Winds of Doctrine, p. 21).

The personalistic school has, then, perfect right to be loyal to its own insights, to acknowledge, with pride and gratitude, its debt to Bowne, in short, to be a school; but it must avoid the pitfalls that beset the school. Bowne must

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not be erected into the St. Thomas of Methodism. open-minded temper must be preserved. The problems of philosophy must be attacked in new ways, and confidence in the possibility of philosophical progress must not falter. The relations of personalism to all contemporary movements of thought and life must be investigated, and vigorous polemic against all forms of impersonalism continued as need arises. The remainder of the present paper will be devoted to a discussion of specific tasks.

If personalism is to assert itself as a permanent factor in the thought of today, it is of prime importance that its representatives should be productive scholars. Without literary productivity, little influence; and without scholarship, literary activity may do more harm than good to the cause. I am not pleading for an encyclopaedic scholarship; no one has read everything, or has worked through every problem with equal thoroughness. Nor am I pleading for a technical scholarship more interested in formal accuracy than in vital meaning. But it is a fact that no philosophy can win or can maintain the respect of the thinking world without a basis in sound scholarship. Philosophy is more than a reciting of sound opinions; it is an interpretation of life in the light of all that logic and history and insight can furnish. Eucken, in spite of his turgidity, and James Ward, for example, have won a hearing by the sheer force of their scholarship. The interest of personalists in life has perhaps tended to produce in some an underestimate of the functions of scholarship. Bowne this was not true; and it need not be true at all. There is no incompatibility between serving the needs of human life and seeking to fulfil the high ideal of scholarship. It does, however, require a longer vision, a profounder faith in rationality and in the essential reasonableness of all persons in that society of which the Supreme Person is head and which is the universe. That service

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