The duty has been assigned me, honored colleagues, of addressing you on the Fundamental Conceptions and the Methods of our common pursuit--philosophy. In endeavoring to deal with the subject in a way not unworthy of its depth and its extent, I have found it impossible to bring the essential material within less compass than would occupy, in reading, at least four times the period granted by our programme. I have therefore complied with the rule of the Congress which directs that, if a more extended writing be left with the authorities for publication, the reading must be restricted to such a portion of it as will not exceed the allotted time. I will accordingly read to you, first, a brief summary of my entire discussion, by way of introduction, and then an excerpt from the larger document, which may serve for a _specimen_, as our scholastic predecessors used to say, of the whole inquiry I have carried out. The impression will, of course, be fragmentary, and I must ask beforehand for your most benevolent allowances, to prevent a judgment too unfavorable. The discussion naturally falls into two main parts: the first dealing with the Fundamental Conceptions; and the second, with the Methods. In the former, after presenting the conception of philosophy itself, as _the consideration of things in the light of the whole_, I take up the involved Fundamental Concepts in the following order:-- I. Whole and Part; II. Subject and Object (Knowing and Being, Mind and Matter; Dualism, Materialism, Idealism); III. Reality and Appearance (Noumenon and Phenomenon); IV. Cause and Effect (Ground and Consequence; Causal System); V. One and Many (Number System; Monism and Pluralism); VI. Time and Space (their relation to Number; their Origin and Real Meaning); VII. Unconditioned and Conditioned (Soul, World, God; their Reinterpretation in terms of Pluralism); VIII. The True, the Beautiful, the Good (their relation to the question between Monism and Pluralism). These are successively dealt with as they rise one out of the other in the process of interpreting them and applying them in the actual creation of philosophy, as this goes on in the historic schools. The theoretic progress of philosophy is in this way explained by them, in its movement from natural dualism, or realism, through the successive forms of monism, materialistic, agnostic, and idealistic, until it reaches the issue, now coming so strongly forward within the school of idealism, between the adherents of monism and those of pluralism.