POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.—The difficulty of popular philosophical discussion is not insuperable. It is all a matter of style. Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, manages by means of an excellent style to make philosophy as easy to understand and as entrancing to follow as certain writers have made the equally difficult subject of economics. It is, in fact, the business of professional thinkers to popularise their subject and to procure for their Muse as many devotees as possible. In the case of Mr. Bertrand Russell, his admirable style has been put into the service of the most abominable philosophy ever formulated. He is an accidentalist of the most thorough-going kind who denies that life has any meaning or purpose. Life appeared, he says, by chance, and will disappear, probably for good, with the cooling of the sun; and he sings like a doomed cricket on a dissolving iceberg. But it is all the more strange in my judgment that a man who thinks thus can write as Mr. Russell writes. There is a contradiction somewhere between the simple richness of his style and the Spartan poverty of his ideas. He thinks glacially, but his style is warm. I suspect that if he were psycho-analysed Mr. Bertrand Russell would turn out to be a walking contradiction. In a word, I don’t believe he believes a word he says! That tone, that style, them there gestures—they betray the stage-player of the spirit. A philosophy written in a popular style is not, of course, the same thing as a popular philosophy. “From a popular philosophy and a philosophical populace, good sense deliver us,” said Coleridge, meaning to say that a philosophy whose substance and not whose expression only has been adapted to the populace is in all probability false and is certainly superficial. For in his _Lay Sermons_, published a hundred years ago, Coleridge supplemented the foregoing remark by deploring the “long and ominous eclipse of philosophy, the usurpation of that venerable name by physical and psychological empiricism, and the non-existence of a learned and philosophical _public_.” Between a philosophic public and a philosophic populace there is the same distinction as between the “public” that reads, let us say, Sedlák, and the “populace” that reads, let us say, Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells is a popular philosopher; but that is manifestly not the same thing as a writer who is trying to make philosophy popular.