Finally, the claim for the over-personal, absolute consciousness in man. It is a triumph of modern science to understand how the duties and ideals have grown up in the history of civilization. What one nation calls moral is perhaps indifferent or immoral for another people or for another time; what the one calls beautiful is ugly for the other; what one period admires as truth is absurdity for another; there is no absolute truth, no absolute beauty, no absolute religion, no absolute morality; and sociology shows how it was necessary that just these ideals and just these obligations should have grown up under a given climate and soil, a given temperament of the race, a given set of economical conditions, a given accumulation of technical achievements. Man has made his Absolute, not the Absolute made man, and whatever hopes and fears make men believe, the scholarly mind cannot doubt that these beliefs and idealizations are merely the products of the feelings and emotions of individuals bound together by equal conditions of life. Leave it to the raptures of the mystic to ignore all scientific truth, to get over-soul connection beyond all experience. In short, to accept Emerson's philosophy, the scientist would say, means to be a poet where Nature is concerned, means to be ignorant where man is concerned, and means to be a mystic where moral and religious, aesthetic and logical ideals are concerned. Can such be the herald of modern philosophy? But those who are so proud and so quick are not aware that the times have changed and that their speech is the wisdom of yesterday. In the history of human knowledge the periods alternate. Great waves follow each other, and while one tendency of scientific thought is ebbing, another is rising; and there is no greater alternation than that between positivism and idealism. The positivistic period of natural science has ebbed for ten or fifteen years; an idealistic one is rising. Emerson once said here in Harvard that the Church has periods when it has wooden chalices and golden priests, and others when it has golden chalices and wooden priests. That is true for the churches of human knowledge too, and for knowledge of all denominations. Forty, fifty years ago, in the great period when Helmholtz discovered the conservation of energy and Darwin the origin of species, one naturalistic triumph followed the other, golden high priests of natural science were working with wooden chalices in narrow, awkward laboratories; to-day natural science has golden chalices provided in luxurious institutions, but there are too many wooden priests. The fullest energies of our time are pressing on to an idealistic revival, are bringing about a new idealistic view of the world, and turning in sympathy to that last foregoing period of idealism of which Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the last original exponent. But also with his period idealism was not new. When he came to speak