At Christmas-time, the American Philosophical Association devoted three sessions to the discussion of the Rôle of the Philosopher in Modern Life. From report, opinion was divided between those who would have him a social reformer, to the exclusion of contemplative background, and those with a greater sense of playing safe, who would have him turn to history, of any sort, or contemplation quite detached from social consequences. Let us hope these opinions are not to be taken seriously. Our social reformers are not all like Dewey, whose neglect of basic reflection is probably not as great as the omission of such reflections from his published works would indicate. Nor is an academic chair generally suited to the specific contacts with life from which successful reforms must be shaped. On the other hand, abstract contemplation with the pedagogic reinforcements advocated, will confirm the popular American sentiment against reflection, if it is true, as Dewey asserts, that education must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. Fortunately genius, if such there be amongst us, will not submit to the opinions of the American Philosophic Association. If philosophy can find freedom, perhaps America can yet find philosophy. HAROLD CHAPMAN BROWN THE LITERARY LIFE Among all the figures which, in Mrs. Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” make up the pallid little social foreground, the still more pallid middle distance, of the New York of forty years ago, there is none more pallid than the figure of Ned Winsett, the “man of letters untimely born in a world that had no need of letters.” Winsett, we are told, “had published one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations,” of which one hundred and twenty copies had been sold, and had then abandoned his calling and taken an obscure post on a women’s weekly. “On the subject of _Hearth-fires_ (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining,” says Mrs. Wharton; “but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up.” Sterile bitterness, a bright futility, a beginning without a future: that is the story of Ned Winsett.