Have we yet felt the full zest of that brave discovery of the last century,--that purpose is not in things but in us? What a declaration of independence there is in that simple phrase, what liberation of a fettered thought to dare all ventures of creative endeavor! Here at last is man’s coming-of-age! Well: now that we have won this freedom, what shall we do with it? That is the question which freedom begets, often as its Frankenstein; for unless freedom makes for life, freedom dies. Once our sloth and cowardice might have pleaded the uselessness of effort in a world where omnipotent purpose lay outside of us, superimposed and unchangeable; now that we can believe that divinity is in ourselves, that purpose and guidance are through us, we can no longer shirk the question of reconstruction. The world is ours to do with what we can and will. Once we believed in the unchangeable environment--that new ogre that succeeded to the Absolute--and (as became an age of _laissez-faire_) we thought that wisdom lay in meeting all its demands; now we know that environments can be remade; and we face the question, How shall we remake ours? This is preëminently a problem in philosophy; it is a question of values. If the world is to be remade, it will have to be under the guidance of philosophy. III Philosophy as Mediator between Science and Statesmanship But why philosophy?--some one asks. Why will not science do? Philosophy dreams, while one by one the sciences which she nursed steal away from her and go down into the world of fact and achievement. Why should not science be called upon to guide us into a better world? Because science becomes more and more a fragmentated thing, with ever less coördination, ever less sense of the whole. Our industrial system has forced division of labor here, as in the manual trades, almost to the point of idiocy: let a man seek to know everything about something, and he will soon know nothing about anything else; efficiency will swallow up the man. Because of this shredded science we have great zoölogists talking infantile patriotism about the war, and great electricians who fill sensational sheets with details of their trips to heaven. We live in a world where thought breaks into pieces, and coördination ebbs; we flounder into a chaos of hatred and destruction because synthetic thinking is not in fashion.