It must also be admitted that the attempts at a reconstruction of systematic philosophy which have followed the rapid disintegration of the Hegelian system, and the enormous accumulations of new material due to the extension of historical studies and of the particular sciences,--including especially the so-called "new psychology,"--have not as yet been fruitful of large results. In philosophy, as in art, politics, and even scientific theory, the spirit and the opportunity of the time are more favorable to the gathering of material and to the projecting of a bewildering variety of new opinions, or old opinions put forth under new names, than to that candid, patient, and prolonged reflection and balancing of judgment which a worthy system-building inexorably requires. The age of breaking up the old, without assimilating the new, has not yet passed away. And whatever is new, startling, large, even monstrous, has in many quarters the seeming preference, in philosophy's building as in other architecture. To the confusion which reigns even in scholastic circles, contributions have been arriving from the outside, from philosophers like Nietzsche, and from men great in literature like Tolstoi. Nor has the matter been helped by the more recent extreme developments of positivism and skepticism, which often enough, without any consciousness of their origin and without the respect for morality and religion which Kant always evinced, really go back to the critical philosophy. In spite of all this, however, the last two decades or more have shown certain hopeful tendencies and notable achievements, looking toward the reconstruction of systematic philosophy. In this attempt to bring order out of confusion, to enable calm, prolonged, and reflective thinking to build into its structure the riches of the new material which the evolution of the race has secured, a place of honor ought to be given to France, where so much has been done of late to blend with clearness of style and independence of thought that calm reflective and critical judgment which looks all sides of human experience sympathetically but bravely in the face. In psychology Ribot, and in philosophy, Fouillée, Renouvier, Secrétan, and others, deserve grateful recognition. No friend of philosophy can, I think, fail to recognize the probable benefits to be derived from that movement with which such names as Mach and Ostwald in Germany are connected, and which is sounding the call to the men of science to clear up the really distressing obscurity and confusion which has so long clung to their fundamental conceptions; and to examine anew the significance of their assumptions, with a view to the construction of a new and improved doctrine of the Being of the World. And if to these names we add those of the numerous distinguished investigators of psychology as pedagogic to philosophy, and, in philosophy, of Deussen, Eucken, von Hartmann, Riehl, Wundt, and others, we may well affirm that