[286] I am thinking, of course, of the entire revolutionary and radical social philosophy that harks back (in theory at least) to the “Social Contract” and to the State of Nature philosophy of Rousseau and his associates and predecessors. [287] See p. 184 of Chapter VII., where I speak of the ability to do this as the invariable possession of the successful American teacher of philosophy. [288] An equivalent of it, of course, exists in many sayings, in many countries, in the conception of the task of the metaphysician as that of “a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which--is not there,” reproduced by Sir Ray Lankester in the recent book of H. S. R. Eliot, _Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson_. There is generally an error or a fallacy in such descriptions of philosophy--in this Lankester story the error that the secret of the world is a kind of “thing in itself” out of all relation to everything we know and experience--the very error against which the pragmatists are protesting. [289] Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, seems to me to have the prejudice that philosophy is at its best only when occupied with studies which (like the mathematics of his affections) are as remote as possible from human life. “Real life is,” he says, “to most men a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.” I cannot--as I have indicated elsewhere in regard to Mr. Russell--see for one moment how there is any justification for looking upon this “ordered cosmos” of mathematical physics as anything other than an abstraction from the real world with which we are acquainted. It is the creation of only one of our many human interests. And I cannot see that the thought that occupies itself with this world is any nobler than the thought that occupies itself with the more complex worlds of life, and of birth and death, and of knowledge and feeling and conduct. Mr. Russell might remember, for one thing, that there have been men (Spinoza among them) who have attempted to treat of human passions under the light of ascertainable laws, and that it is (to say the very least) as legitimate for philosophy to seek for reason and law in human life, and in the evolution of human history, as in the abstract world of physical and mathematical science. Can, too, a mathematical philosophy afford any final haven for the spirit of man, without an examination of the _mind_ of the