logical interdependence. The time is ripe for a school of philosophy to play this rôle and to fulfil again its old historical mission, to be the unifying principle of human knowledge and life. The second half of the nineteenth century was essentially controlled by realistic energies, by the spirit of analysis, by the triumph of natural science and technique. But a long time before the century came to an end a reaction started throughout the whole intellectual globe; the synthetic energies again came to the foreground, the idealistic interests were emphasized in the most different quarters; the historical and social sciences make to-day the same rapid progress which fifty years ago characterized the natural sciences, and everywhere in the midst of the empirical sciences there is awakening again the interest in philosophy. In the days of anti-philosophical naturalism scientists believed that philosophy had come to an end and that an unphilosophical positivism might be substituted for real philosophy; to-day the mathematicians and physicists, the chemists and biologists, the historians and economists eagerly turn again and again to philosophy, and on the borderland between philosophy and the empirical sciences they seek their most important problems and discussions. The world begins to feel once more that all knowledge is empty if it has no inner unity, and that the inner unity can be brought about only by that science which enquires into the fundamental conceptions and methods of thought with which the special sciences work, into the presuppositions and ultimate axioms with which they begin, into the laws of mental life which lie at the basis of every experience, into the ways of teaching the truth, and above all into the value of human knowledge, its absolute meaning and its relation to all the other human values--those of morality, beauty, and religion. The most advanced thinkers of our time are working to-day in all fields of knowledge to restore such a unity of human life through philosophy. To foster this spirit of the twentieth century in the life of our University there is no more direct way possible than to give a dignified home to the philosophical work. Such a building ought to be a Harvard Union for scholarly life.