Add to this self-befoggery the appalling _historismus_ (as Eucken calls it), the strange lifeless interest in the past for its own sake, the petty poring over problems of text and minutiæ of theory in the classics of speculation;--and the indictment of philosophy as a useless appanage of the idle rich gains further ground. We do not seem to understand how much of the past is dead, how much of it is but a drag on the imaginative courage that dares to think of a future different from the past, and better. Philosophy is too much a study of the details of superseded systems; it is too little the study of the miraculous living moment in which the past melts into the present and the future finds creation. Most people have an invincible habit of turning their backs to the future; they like the past because the future is an adventure. So with most philosophers to-day; they like to write analyses of Kant, commentaries on Berkeley, discussions of Plato’s myths; they are students remembering, they have not yet become men thinking. They do not know that the work of philosophy is in the street as well as in the library, they do not feel and understand that the final problem of philosophy is not the relation of subject and object but the misery of men. And so it is well that philosophy, such as it chiefly is in these days, should be scorned as a busy idler in a world where so much work is asking to be done. Philosophy was vital in Plato’s day; so vital that some philosophers were exiled and others put to death. No one would think of putting a philosopher to death to-day. Not because men are more delicate about killing; but because there is no need to kill that which is already dead.[299] II Philosophy as Control But after all, this is not a subject for rhetoric so much as for resolution. Here we are again in our splendid library; here we sit, financially secure, released from the material necessities of life, to stand apart and study, to report and help and state and solve; under us those millions holding us aloft so that we may see for them, dying by the thousand so that we may find the truth that will make the others free; and what do we do? We make phrases like “_esse est percipi_,” “synthetic judgments _à priori_,” and “being is nothing”; we fill the philosophic world with great Saharas of Kantiana; we write epistemology for two hundred years. Surely there is but one decent thing for us to do: either philosophy is of vital use to the community, or it is not. If it is not, we will abandon it; if it is, then we must seek that vital use and show it. We have been privileged to study and think and travel and learn the world; and now we stand gaping before it as if there were nothing wrong, as if nothing could be done, as if nothing should be done. We are expert eyes, asked to point the way; and all that we report is that there is nothing to see, and nowhere to go. We are without even a partial sense of the awful responsibility of intelligence.