This is the final faith: that truth will make us free, so far as we can ever be free. Let the truth be published to the world, and men separated in the dark will see one another, and one another’s purposes, more clearly, and with saner understanding than before. The most disastrous thing you can do to an evil is to describe it. Let truth be told, and the parasite will lose his strength through shame, and meanness will hide its face. Only let information be given to all and freely, and it will be a cleansing of our national blood; enmity will yield to open and honest opposition, where it will not indeed become coöperation. All we need is to see better. Let there be light. V The Chance of Philosophy “One more objection before you take the money. And that is: What on earth has all this to do with philosophy? I can understand that to have economists on your investigating committees, and biologists, and psychologists, and historians, would be sensible; but what could a philosopher do? These are matters for social science, not for metaphysics. Leave the philosophers out and some of us may take your scheme seriously.” * * * * * It is a good objection, if only because it shows again the necessity for a new kind of philosopher. Merely to make such an objection is to reënforce the indictment brought above against the philosopher as he is. But what of the philosopher as he might be? What might the philosopher be? Well, first of all, he would be a living man, and not an annotator of the past. He would have grown freely, his initial spark of divine fire unquenched by scholastic inflexibilities of discipline and study. He would have imbibed no sermons, but his splendid curiosity would have found food and encouragement from his teachers. He would have lived in and learned to love the country and the city; he would be at home in the ploughed fields as well as in the centres of learning; he would like the cleansing solitude of the woods and yet too the invigorating bustle of the city streets. He would be brought up on Plato and Thucydides, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Bacon and Montaigne; he would study the civilization of Greece and that of the Renaissance on all sides, joining the history of politics, economics, and institutions with that of science, literature, and philosophy; and yet he would find time to study his own age thoroughly. He would be interested in life, and full of it; he would jump into campaigns, add his influence carefully to movements he thought good, and help make the times live up more nearly to their possibilities. He would not shut himself up forever in laboratories, libraries, and lecture rooms; he would live more widely than that. He would be of the earth earthly, of the world worldly. He would not talk of ideals in the abstract and do nothing for them in the concrete; above all else in the world he would abhor the kind of talk that is a refuge from the venture and responsibility of action.