the words,[204] “Our existence as conscious beings is essentially an activity, and activity is a process which, by its very nature, is directed towards an end, and can neither exist nor be conceived apart from this end.” There are, doubtless, many philosophers of to-day who are convinced that philosophy is purely an intellectual matter, and can never be anything else than an attempt to analyze the world for _thought_--an attempt to state its value in the terms of thought. Against all these and many similar considerations it would be idle to set up a hard and fast codification or characterization of the work of the philosophy or philosophers of to-day. Still, the world will accord the name of philosopher to any man--Renan, for example, or Spencer or Huxley or Nordau or Nietzsche--who comes before it with views upon the universe and humanity that may, for any conceivable reason, be regarded as fundamental. And on this showing of things, as well as from many indications in the work of those who are philosophers by profession, it may be said that the predominating note of the newer philosophy is its openness to the facts of the volitional and emotional and moral and social aspects of man’s life, as things that take us further along the path of truth than the mere categories of thought and their manipulation by metaphysic and epistemology. II. The Newer Idealism does not dream of questioning the positive work of the Kantian and Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian idealists. It knows only too well that even scientific men like Helmholtz and Du Bois Reymond, that “positive” philosophers like Riehl and Laas and Feuerbach and others have, through the influence of the Kantian philosophy, learned and accepted the fact of there being “ideal” or psychical or “mind-supplied” factors in so-called external reality. There are among the educated men of to-day very few Dr. Johnsons who ridicule the psycho-physical, or the metaphysical, analysis of external reality, who believe in a crass and crude and self-sufficient “matter” utterly devoid of psychical attributes or characteristics. True, Herbert Spencer has written words to the effect that “If the Idealist (Berkeley) is right, then the doctrine of Evolution is a dream”; but then everything in Spencer’s philosophy about an “actuality lying behind appearances” and about our being compelled “to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some Power by which we are acted upon,” is against the possibility of our believing that, according to that philosophy, an unconscious and non-spiritual “matter” could evolve itself into conscious life and moral experience. The philosophers of to-day have indeed rejoiced to see Kant’s lesson popularized by such various phases and movements of human thought as psychophysical research, art and æsthetic theory, the interest in Buddhism (with its idealistic theory of the knowledge of the senses), and the speculative biology of Weismann and others. That people generally should see that