[24] This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for one thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle. It is an anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern physics to substitute a dynamic for a static conception of matter, or atoms, or substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how Aristotle’s doctrine of a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an ἐνέργεια that is not mere change or motion, but a perfect “life” involving the disappearance of “time” and imperfection] is in a sense the solution of the old [Greek] and the modern demand for the substance or essence of things. We shall take occasion (in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of the concept of activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson) to use the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in this essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world. [25] For a favourable estimate of the services of Dr. Schiller in regard to Pragmatism and Humanism the reader may consult the articles of Captain Knox in the _Quarterly Review_, 1909. [26] _Studies in Humanism_, p. 19. The remarks made in this paragraph will have to be modified, to some extent, in view of the recent (1911) appearance of the third edition of Dr. Schiller’s _Riddles of the Sphinx_. This noteworthy book contains, to say the very least, a great deal in the way of a positive ontology, or theory of being, and also many quite different rulings in respect of the nature of metaphysic and of the matter of its relation to science and to common sense. It rests, in the main, upon the idea of a perfect society of perfected individuals as at once the true reality and the end of the world-process--an idea which exists also, at least in germ, in the pluralistic philosophy of Professor James; and we shall indeed return to this practical, or sociological, philosophy as the outcome, not only of Pragmatism, but also of Idealism, as conceived by representative living thinkers. Despite, however, these many positive and constructive merits of this work of Dr. Schiller’s, it is for many reasons not altogether unfair to its spirit to contend that his philosophy is still, in the main, that of a humanistic pragmatism in which both “theory” and “practice” are conceived as experimentally and as hypothetically as they are by Professor Dewey. [27] See p. 106. [28] See Professor Bawden’s book upon Pragmatism. [29] _Pragmatism_, p. 58. [30] _Ibid._ 76. [31] _Studies in Logical Theory_, p. 2. [32] I endeavour to indicate what this Humanism and Personalism may be in my sixth chapter. [33] _Journ. of Phil. Psychol._, 1906, p. 338. [34] From vol. ii. (p. 322) of Baldwin’s _Dictionary of Philosophy_. Dr. C. S. Peirce, formerly a teacher of mathematics and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, was made by James into the father or patron saint of Pragmatism. James confesses to have been stimulated into Pragmatism by the teachings of Peirce.