But the spirit of such a memorial hour demands, more than all, sincerity. Can we sincerely say that the choice was wise, when we look at it from the point of view of the philosophical interests? It was beautiful to devote the building to Emerson. Was it wise, yes, was it morally right to devote Emerson's name to the Philosophy Building? Again and again has such a doubt found expression. Your building, we have heard from some of the best, belongs to scientific philosophy; the men who are to teach under its roof are known in the world as serious scholars, who have no sympathy with the vague pseudo-philosophy of popular sentimentalists; between the walls of your hall you will have the apparatus of experimental psychology, and you will be expected to do there the most critical and most consistent work in methodology and epistemology. Is it not irony to put over the door, through which daily hundreds of students are to enter, the name of a man who may be a poet and a prophet, a leader in literature and a leader in life, but who certainly was a mystic and not a thinker, an enthusiast but not a philosopher? Not only those who belittle him to-day and who short-sightedly deny even his immense religious influence, but even many of Emerson's warmest admirers hold such an opinion. They love him, they are inspired by the superb beauty of his intuitions, but they cannot respect the content of his ideas, if they do not wish to deny all their modern knowledge and scientific insight. Yes, for the most part they deny that his ideas form at all a connected whole; they are aphorisms, beautiful sparks. Did he not himself say: "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall." And yet how can there be philosophy without consistency; how can we interpret reality if we contradict ourselves? If Emerson's views of the world did really not aim at consistency and did really ignore our modern knowledge, then it would be better to go on with our philosophical work in Harvard without shelter and roof than to have a hall whose name symbolizes both the greatest foe of philosophy, the spirit of inconsistency, and the greatest danger for philosophy, the mystic vagueness which ignores real science.