ABSTRACT
To attempt to review and summarize the results of a life-time's philosophizing is, as Ibsen says of the writing of poetry, "to hold Doomsday over oneself." Probably what was best in it has long ago sunk beyond recovery into the depths of the mind, constituting there its hidden framework and controlling unseen its attitudes, moods, and ways of operation. The endeavour once more to live through, to recall and record, the steps in the process of its formation, brings back but a mere outline of its history, a brief and abstract chronicle, and the slowly deposited results are, when reviewed in memory, but a meagre harvest of autobiographical material. Yet a would-be or professed philosopher can scarcely decline the challenge to report upon his processes and their results, for, more than his fellows, he has tried to make or remake his mind with open eyes, claims in doing so not to have wasted his time and energies, and to have been all the time engaged in a business of concern to others as well as to himself. Certainly a protected and endowed teacher of philosophy can scarcely disclaim a responsibility to others for the activity which has occupied the greater part of his working days or refuse to justify himself. However modestly he may estimate his own personal part in what, to use Bacon's word, is the essentially ' collegiate ' business of philosophizing, he cannot disloyally leave philosophy itself undefended. Nor can he do otherwise than identify the cause of philosophy itself with that particular or personal form of it, which he has perhaps inherited or acquired from others, but which also he has appro-
Such reflections may serve as an excuse for setting down some of the stages that an individual professor of philosophy has traversed, and for recalling with gratitude some of the influences which have shaped his philosophy, even at the risk of indulging in reminiscences too personal to be of general interest or importance.
