Thus we understand nothing whatever exists but our own cogitations, or, as the sailor jocosely expressed it--"'Tis all in my eye"--and after these many years we are brought back to the famous expression of the Boston Transcendentalist, "we should not say _it rains, it snows_, we should say _I rain, I snow_." This, gentle, patient reader, is no burlesque, that you have been reading, it is the wisdom of the Concord Symposium of professors and authors meeting near the end of the 19th century, and basking in the smiles of _cultured_ Boston! or at least that portion which is devoted to the Bostonese idea of philosophy, and thinks the feeblest glimmer of antiquity worth more than the science of to-day. Such indeed are the sentiments of the President of Boston University. And as for the wisdom of Concord, the _Open Court_, which is good authority, says: "Dr. Harris and Prof. Davidson are, without doubt, the _pillars of the school_; but there is some difference of opinion as to which is its _indispensable support_." An intelligent spectator would say that more metaphysical acumen and vigor has been displayed by DR. EDWARD MONTGOMERY than by all the remainder of those engaged in the blind hunt for philosophy at Concord. On the last day of the Symposium, July 28, the report says "The burden has fallen wholly upon Prof. Harris, and he has borne it so as to excite the _wonder and admiration_ of his listeners. He _went to the very bottom of things_ as far as human thought could go, and there, as he put it, was on solid rock, with no possibility of scepticism. Both his forenoon and evening lectures were _masterly in their way_." Exactly so; they were unsurpassed as a reproduction of the style and manner of the Aristotelian folly which held Europe fast in that wretched period called the Dark Ages, which preceded the dawn of intelligence with Galileo. About one half of the reported lectures on Aristotle is, though cloudy, intelligible. The remainder is a fair specimen of that skimmy-dashy style of thought which glances over the surfaces of things and never reaches their substance or reality, yet boasts of its unlimited profundity because it does not know the meaning of profound. Such thinking must necessarily end in falsity and folly, of which the lecture gives many specimens, which it is worth while to quote, to show what the devotees of antiquity call philosophy--thus: "If we cannot know the ultimate nature of being, then philosophy is impossible, for philosophy differs from other kind of knowing by seeking a first principle." "The objects of philosophy then include those of ontology. They are first the nature of the ultimate being of the universe, the first principle, the idea of God."