If now, in the present course of Lectures, I shall succeed in laying before you my subject in that clearness and distinctness which are necessary to enable you to comprehend the whole, and, while taking a survey of it, to judge of the agreement of the several parts, you will find, I trust, no difficulty in discovering the fundamental idea and sentiment. And further, I would venture to entreat you not to judge hastily of this sentiment from single expressions, and least of all at the very outset, but, waiting for its progressive development, to judge of it on the whole. Lastly, I would also indulge a hope that the views of an individual thinker, if perspicuously enunciated, may, even where they fail of conviction, and though points of difference still subsist, produce no revolting impression on your minds; but, by exercising a healing influence on many a rankling wound in thought and life, produce among us some of the fairest fruits of true philosophy. Hitherto we have been considering, first of all, the object and proper sphere of the philosophy of life; and, secondly, its appropriate form of communication, as well as all other methods which are alien and foreign to it. Of great and decisive importance for the whole course and further development of philosophical inquiry is it to determine, in the next place, the starting-point from which it ought to set out. It will not do to believe that we have found this in any axiom or postulate such as are usually placed at the head of a system. For such a purpose we must rather investigate the inmost foundation--the root out of which springs the characteristic feature of a philosophical view. Now, in the philosophy of life the whole consciousness, with all its different phases and faculties, must inevitably be taken for the foundation, the soul being considered as the center thereof. This simple basis being once laid, it may be further developed in very different ways. For it is, I might almost say, a matter of indifference from what point in the circumference or periphery we set out in order to arrive at the center, with the design of giving a further development to this as the foundation of the whole. But in order to illustrate this simple method of studying life from its true central point, which is intermediate between the two wrong courses already indicated, and in order to make, by contrast, my meaning the plainer, I would here, in a few words, characterize the false starting-point from which the prevailing philosophy of a day--whether that of France in the eighteenth century or the more recent systems of Germany--has hitherto, for the most part, proceeded. False do I call it, both on account of the results to which it has led, and also of its own intrinsic nature. In one case as well as in the other, the starting-point was invariably some controverted point of the reason--some opposition or other to the legitimacy of the reason--under which term, however, little else generally was understood