It is ours to show this normative function of philosophy, this power to reign as the unifying discipline in the entire realm of our possible knowledge; to show it by showing that the very nature of philosophy--its elemental concepts and its directing ideals, its methods taken in their systematic succession--is such as must result in a view of universal reality that will supply the principle at once giving rise to all the sciences and connecting them all into one harmonious whole. Such, and so grave, my honored colleagues, is the duty assigned to this hour. Sincerely can I say, Would it had fallen to stronger hands than mine! But since to mine it has been committed, I will undertake it in no disheartened spirit; rather, in that temper of animated hope in which the whole Congress has been conceived and planned. And I draw encouragement from the place, and its associations, where we are assembled--from its historic connections not only with the external expansion of our country, but with its growth in culture, and especially with its growth in the cultivation of philosophy. For your speaker, at least, can never forget that here in St. Louis, the metropolis of the region by which our national domain was in the Louisiana Purchase so enlarged,--here was the centre of a movement in philosophic study that has proved to be of national import. It is fitting that we all, here to-day, near to the scene itself, commemorate the public service done by our present National Commissioner of Education and his group of enthusiastic associates, in beginning here, in the middle years of the preceding century, those studies of Kant and his great idealistic successors that unexpectedly became the nucleus of a wider and more penetrating study of philosophy in all parts of our country. It is with quickened memories belonging to the spot where, more than five-and-thirty years ago, it was my happy fortune to take some part with Dr. Harris and his companions, that I begin the task assigned me. The undertaking seems less hopeless when I can here recall the names and the congenial labors of Harris, of Davidson, of Brockmeyer, of Snider, of Watters, of Jones,--half of them now gone from life. They "builded better than they knew;" and, humbly as they may themselves have estimated their ingenuous efforts to gain acquaintance with the greatest thoughts, history will not fail to take note of what they did, as marking one of the turning-points in the culture of our nation. The publication of the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, granting all the subtractions claimed by its critics on the score of defects (of which its conductors were perhaps only too sensible), was an influence that told in all our circles of philosophical study, and thence in the whole of our social as well as our academic life. * * * * *