In view of this truth respecting the limitations of systematic philosophy, I think we may hold that certain negative results, which are customarily adduced as unfavorable to the claims of philosophical progress, are really signs of improvement during the latter half of the nineteenth century. One is an increased spirit of reserve and caution, and an increased modesty of claims. This result is perhaps significant of riper wisdom and more trustworthy maturity. Kant believed himself to have established for philosophy a system of apodeictic conclusions, which were as completely forever to have displaced the old dogmatism as Copernicus had displaced the Ptolemaic astronomy. But the steady pressure of historical and scientific studies has made it increasingly difficult for any sane thinker to claim for any system of thinking such demonstrable validity. May we not hope that the students of the particular sciences, to whom philosophy owes so much of its enforced sanity and sane modesty, will themselves soon share freely of the philosophic spirit with regard to their own metaphysics and ethical and religious standpoints, touching the Ultimate Reality? Even when the recoil from the overweening self-satisfaction and crass complacency of the earlier part of the last century takes the form of melancholy, or of acute sadness, or even of a mild despair of philosophy, I am not sure that the last state of that man is not better than the first. In connection with this improvement in spirit, we may also note an improvement in the method of philosophy. The purely speculative method, with its intensely interesting but indefensible disregard of concrete facts, and of the conclusions of the particular sciences, is no longer in favor even among the most ardent devotees and advocates of the superiority of philosophy to those sciences. At the same time, philosophy may quite properly continue to maintain its position of independent critic, as well as of docile pupil, toward the particular sciences.