The supreme service of William James to philosophy is the restoration of philosophy to the uses of life. At least that is the tendency of his philosophy. Even though much wisdom still remains shut up in a tower, indifferent to life, and though life may often be ungrateful to and suspicious of such wisdom as is offered to it, nevertheless James's attempt to bring about a _rapprochement_ was his finest contribution and is expressed in some of his most glowing pages. He came at the right time and illustrated in himself one of his hearty beliefs that Humanity will produce all the types of thinker that it needs. At the moment when he entered the realm of philosophy, the physical sciences had arrogantly assumed, if not all wisdom, the possession of the correct method of searching for wisdom. On the other hand, the transcendental philosophers held themselves aloof from the physical sciences and ignored psychology. This division of interest in a world which James himself tried to keep manageably split up and pluralistic, was his first philosophic perplexity and, in his treatment of the problem, he committed himself to inconsistencies and self-contradictions, which were partly inherent in the situation and partly due to his temperament. Through all his writings, from one of his earliest papers (that on Renan's "Dialogues," republished in "Collected Essays and Reviews") to the last chapters of "The Meaning of Truth," James saw philosophers as so many individuals, each fighting under his own banner of truth, and he was puzzled because they would not be reconciled and fight together against the powers of darkness which must be conquered if philosophy is ever to be worth anything, and if there is ever to be any reason why there should be philosophers to sit in comfortably endowed chairs. No critic took more keenly humorous delight than James did in the disputes of the schools, or stirred up with more lively argument the factions whose lack of solidarity he deplored. Take two examples. While James was young and still under the influence of his laboratory studies he made out a good case for psychology as a natural science, admitting that in its present stage of development it is rather a loose subject, but demanding for its best interests an application of the scientific method. Then he saw that he had gone counter to his own belief in the unity of knowledge, or the unity of study. It occurred to him that something valuable might be lost to psychology if metaphysical and epistemological inquiries were debarred. So in an address to the American Psychological Association, he openly renounced his first position, adding, however, as a half-smiling reservation, that metaphysics should give up some of its nonsense as a condition of admission.