At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the students devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the laudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholar to address them, the occasion often being made a public one. I have from time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had my discourse printed in one or other of the Reviews. It has seemed to me that these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, as they shed exp

Hypotheses and options, 1 . Pascal's wager, 5 . Clifford's veto, 8 . Psychological causes of belief, 9 . Thesis of the Essay, 11 . Empiricism and absolutism, 12 . Objective certitude and its unattainability, 13 . Two different sorts of risks in believing, 17 . Some risk unavoidable, 19 . Faith may bring forth its own verification, 22 . Logical conditions of religious belief, 25 ....

Temperamental Optimism and Pessimism, 33 . How reconcile with life one bent on suicide? 38 . Religious melancholy and its cure, 39 . Decay of Natural Theology, 43 . Instinctive antidotes to pessimism, 46 . Religion involves belief in an unseen extension of the world, 51 . Scientific positivism, 52 . Doubt actuates conduct as much as belief does, 54 . To deny certain faiths is logically absurd, for they make their objects true, 56 . Conclusion, 6l ....

Rationality means fluent thinking, 63 . Simplification, 65 . Clearness, 66 . Their antagonism, 66 . Inadequacy of the abstract, 68 . The thought of nonentity, 71 . Mysticism, 74 . Pure theory cannot banish wonder, 75 . The passage to practice may restore the feeling of rationality, 75 . Familiarity and expectancy, 76 . 'Substance,' 80 . A rational world must appear congruous with our powers, 82 . But these differ from man to man, 88 . Faith is one of them, 90 . Inseparable from doubt, 95 . May v

Prestige of Physiology, 112 . Plan of neural action, 113 . God the mind's adequate object, 116 . Contrast between world as perceived and as conceived, 118 . God, 120 . The mind's three departments, 123 . Science due to a subjective demand, 129 . Theism a mean between two extremes, 134 . Gnosticism, 137 . No intellection except for practical ends, 140 . Conclusion, 142 ....

Philosophies seek a rational world, 146 . Determinism and Indeterminism defined, 149 . Both are postulates of rationality, 152 . Objections to chance considered, 153 . Determinism involves pessimism, 159 . Escape via Subjectivism, 164 . Subjectivism leads to corruption, 170 . A world with chance in it is morally the less irrational alternative, 176 . Chance not incompatible with an ultimate Providence, 180 ....

The moral philosopher postulates a unified system, 185 . Origin of moral judgments, 185 . Goods and ills are created by judgment?, 189 . Obligations are created by demands, 192 . The conflict of ideals, 198 . Its solution, 205 . Impossibility of an abstract system of Ethics, 208 . The easy-going and the strenuous mood, 211 . Connection between Ethics and Religion, 212 ....

Solidarity of causes in the world, 216 . The human mind abstracts in order to explain, 219 . Different cycles of operation in Nature, 220 . Darwin's distinction between causes that produce and causes that preserve a variation, 221 . Physiological causes produce, the environment only adopts or preserves, great men, 225 . When adopted they become social ferments, 226 . Messrs. Spencer and Allen criticised, 232 . Messrs. Wallace and Gryzanowski quoted, 239 . The laws of history, 244 . Mental evolut

Small differences may be important, 256 . Individual differences are important because they are the causes of social change, 259 . Hero-worship justified, 261 ....

The world appears as a pluralism, 264 . Elements of unity in the pluralism, 268 . Hegel's excessive claims, 273 . He makes of negation a bond of union, 273 . The principle of totality, 277 . Monism and pluralism, 279 . The fallacy of accident in Hegel, 280 . The good and the bad infinite, 284 . Negation, 286 . Conclusion, 292 .—Note on the Anaesthetic revelation, 294 ....

The unclassified residuum, 299 . The Society for Psychical Research and its history, 303 . Thought-transference, 308 . Gurney's work, 309 . The census of hallucinations, 312 . Mediumship, 313 . The 'subliminal self,' 315 . 'Science' and her counter-presumptions, 317 . The scientific character of Mr. Myers's work, 320 . The mechanical-impersonal view of life versus the personal-romantic view, 324 ....

In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his brother, Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to which the latter went when he was a boy. The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse with his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between justification and sanctification?—Stephen, prove the omnipotence of God!" etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference we are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox College conversation continue

When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the liver " had great currency in the newspapers. The answer which I propose to give to-night cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare's prologues,— "I come no more to make you laugh; things now, That bear a weighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"— must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate

What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply: They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which every one by nature carries about with him under his hat. But suppose this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance? The only answer can be

Let me confess to the diffidence with which I find myself standing here to-day. When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall, the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept a challenge,—not because they wish to fight, but because they are ashamed to say no. Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, I felt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which a teacher can be exposed,—the ordeal of teaching other teachers. Fortunately, the trial will last b

A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which every one has heard. This is a radical mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,—not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the ideas of fat

The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race's moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other, however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts to which th

A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other. It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a few very general remarks on the method of getting at scientific truth. It is a common platitude that a complete acquaintance with any one thing, however small, would require a knowledge of the entire universe. Not a sparrow falls to the ground but so

The previous Essay, on Great Men, etc., called forth two replies,—one by Mr. Grant Allen, entitled the 'Genesis of Genius,' in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. xlvii. p. 351; the other entitled 'Sociology and Hero Worship,' by Mr. John Fiske, ibidem , p. 75. The article which follows is a rejoinder to Mr. Allen's article. It was refused at the time by the Atlantic, but saw the day later in the Open Court for August, 1890. It appears here as a natural supplement to the foregoing article, on which it ca

We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and American philosophy. Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted among the privat-docenten and younger professors of Germany, and whose older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher walks of thought.

"The great field for new discoveries," said a scientific friend to me the other day, "is always the unclassified residuum." Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to. The ideal of every science is that of a closed and completed system of truth. The charm of most sciences to their more passive