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"Guyau had a profound conception of life, considering the idea of life as more fundamental than that of force, which is only an extraction and an abstraction; as more fundamental than that of movement, the lifeless silhouette of the animated; as more fundamental even than the idea of existence, since the only existence known to us directly is that of our own life as we feel it, from which we afterwards take this or that attribute in order to conceive other existences. The so-called material existences are, according to Guyau, nothing but life diminished or at its finish. To sum up, all is life, everything is living, and we cannot conceive of anything truly real which is not living. All determinism is at bottom vital".

Life, according to Guyau, implies essentially conscience, intelligence, sensibility, contact-with what has relation to others and not solely to oneself. It is more than instinct, more also than the calculation of what is useful after Bentham's fashion; more than egoism and the cult of the self; more even than altruism, although that comes nearer expressing its true nature and direction." Altruism is associated with an individualistic psychology, which fails to explain Human and Divine Sympathy, and leaves no proper place for its higher life.

LASTING IMPRESSIONS OF A GREAT TEACHER

JOHN GODFREY HILL

The greatness of a great teacher is best tested by what remains of his teaching and spirit in the life and thought of his pupils after the fading length of more than a decade.

While seated in my study with the memory of my sainted teacher, Dr. Bowne, fresh in my mind, my eye most naturally rested on the shelf containing the sixteen inches of books of which he is the author. I began to take them down tenderly, one by one. Curiously enough, I did not read the printed page, but rather the marginal notes which I had taken years ago, hot from the living lips of the lucid lecturer as they were spoken with his characteristic force and clearness.

Permit me then to inflict upon the reader a few of these marginal notes which, I believe, glimpse forth in a singular manner the soul and mind of one of America's mightiest teachers. As regards the fresh intuitions of life itself Dr. Bowne was an avowed pragmatist with a healthy touch of mysticism.

"These convictions by which we live," I quote from marginal notes, "never come by speculative reason. They were given us and never can come any other way. Drain life of native trust in life and experience and no philosophy can supply life with it. We are free to venture beyond knowledge and push toward the heights. We can look toward the bright side of life and push through to confidence; or, we can look toward the dark side and break through to blind pessimism, and perish. We must take our choice. As Faust would say, 'Choose well; thy time is brief, yet endless.' At the end of one road stands God; at the end of the other-well, blind alleys and broken hopes and forlorn philosophic leaders, mired deep in the swamps of their own logomachy."

What withering contempt Dr. Bowne had for all kinds of

"logomachy," (to use his own pet expressions), "closet philosophy," the "fallacy of the universal," "magazine science," "sensational psychology" and "dictionary religion."

One of the marginal scribblings brings back to me a striking incident of the class-room. He was paying his disturbing respect to the sensational psychologists of the day. Holding up his index finger and crooking it several times he exclaimed rather warmly, "I defy the whole psychological crowd to explain this action. All the hidden mystery of man and God are involved. It is not to be so simply explained by a swarm of sensations and nerve-shocks." And after a pause he continued, "These miserable verbal classifications terribly infest our age. There ought to be a mental board of health to clean up these verbally infested germ regions. There is much indecent exposure, parading as wisdom, in the world of thought."

In his bracing outlook upon God and religion, Dr. Bowne proved, and still proves, a refreshing antidote to the "mudgods" of our day who are supported by the "neat, smug rationalism" of our time.

From the notes I read again, “Life starts with legs and rarely travels on logic. The larger part of our belief has its origin in life. Actions are a real test of our beliefs, rather than mere assent. Life makes necessary postulates that suffice for practical living. This is the main thing, after all. Thus we venture beyond sense knowledge, at will, but at our own risk and with open eyes. Thus Hume fell back upon 'natural instinct' and Kant, upon 'practical reason' to escape the consequences of their own logic. God is not disposed of by an appeal to the dictionary, nor is the world accounted for by a 'concourse of fortuitous atoms.' The dreary, see-saw, oscillating explanations of an impersonal world are not respectable to decent thinking. We can't speak for long of things unless they appear respectable. When dirt is lifted to cosmic purpose and expresses divine will and follows rational plan, which is neither outside nor inside of God in spacial measurements, but which

expresses unpicturable dependence upon the Eternal One in whom all things live, move, and have their being,—then only has it intelligible meaning. As musical tones exist only as the player performs and while he performs, and depend for their continuity at every moment upon the will, purpose and action of the musician; so this world depends upon God, the Personal One, who plays the tune of cosmos with steady purpose, faultless reason and loving energy through timeless succession".

One felt daily that with Dr. Bowne philosophy passed into religion and reason into conscience. The class-room was turned into devotions; yet fervid worship never displaced flawless logic, and lurid mysticism never was permitted to outrun excellent conclusions. His printed page may seem cold, rigid, relentless reason only; not so was the living teacher behind the desk. There, sparkling wit, incisive logic, unfailing reverence and practical interests mingled and mixed together with unparalleled freshness, unwearied interest and massed impressiveness. As he ascribed quickening spirit and conscious life and throbbing personality to the universe, so he himself was to his pupils the living soul of his system of philosophy. I cannot separate Dr. Bowne's system of thought from himself as I received it from him in the classroom.

May I not close with a note which I made on the margin of his "Ethics" on the day of his return from that farcical heresy trial, which shameful thing occurred at the time that I studied under him. We, the sixty-odd students of the class, clamored for an explanation. He only shook his head and beckoned with his hand for silence and started in to lecture where he had left off a week before. The clamor increased so that he was compelled to give heed. With that characteristic flash of the eye which no words can convey to those who have not seen it, he playfully and laconically remarked, "Well, there isn't much to be said; I came, I saw, and the rest concurred."

Thus, I fancy, he came and saw into systems of philosophy and the rest concur.

CURRENT THOUGHT

Reviving the Bowne Theory.

The Methodist Review of May-June is notable as a revival of the memory of Borden Parker Bowne. All former students, lovers and followers of Bowne will hail with special interest the last work of Bowne, The Present Status of the Conflict of Faith which was dictated by him the day before his death in April, 1910. When one thinks of the changes that have taken place in the world's thinking since this essay was dictated the surprising thing is its up-to-dateness. This is because Bowne ever dealt in fundamentals rather than in the incidents and accidents of passing opinion. He summed up the conflict of faith as it relates to the problem of knowledge, as follows: "Thus in the realm of knowledge the conflict of faith with unfaith is very strongly inclined toward the side of faith. The sensational views of man which were so apt to issue in animalism and selfishness have no longer any philosophical standing, and the recent agnosticism of the Spencerian system may be looked upon as obsolete. Instead of it we have, as already said, the way for rational belief left open. The primacy of the practical reason is assured. The weakness of the speculative reason, when it comes under experience and its indications, is clearly seen. Meanwhile life has the field, and it is permitted to see visions and to dream dreams, to proceed pragmatically, to accept those principles which are rooted in life as the product of life, as the principles which alone give life any meaning or save it from hideous collapse."

That which he writes of Theism will equally apply under the later discoveries of radio and the startling assumptions of the Einsteinian declarations. "The rustic looks out on the heavens and sees the blue sky and the shining sun or the moon and the stars, and he is perfectly satisfied that he has seen it all. But the astronomer comes and the rustic's view vanishes. We are made acquainted with suns and systems and wonders unsuspected. Or we look into the pure air when the sun is shining, and we seem to be moving along in the midst of light which appears to us to stretch away indefinitely. But the physicist comes, and we find that the sphere of light which seems to encircle the world is a very small affair, the result of reflection and refraction of the sun's rays, while the earth itself is driving along in the deepest possible darkness of an ether vibrating but never luminous, light-bearing but never shining. And the chemist comes and tells us of the composition of bodies about us, so that they, too, are not in any respect what they seem. We hear of molecules and atoms and of vortex rings in the ether, and nowadays since the discovery of radium things seem to have grown more mysterious still. We seem to be immersed in a sphere of unpicturable activity all about us, manifesting itself here and there in a few sense objects, but for the most part not manifesting itself, yet all the while demonstratively real. When we follow out considerations of this kind we are introduced to a new order of

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