religious life. Yet all its troubles can be treated with absurdly
little technicality. The wonder is that, with their way of working
philosophy, individual Germans should preserve any spontaneity of
mind at all. That they still manifest freshness and originality in so
eminent a degree, proves the indestructible richness of the german
cerebral endowment.

Let me repeat once more that a man's vision is the great fact about
him. Who cares for Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's?
A philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all
definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions
of human characters upon it. In the recent book from which I quoted
the words of Professor Paulsen, a book of successive chapters by
various living german philosophers,[4] we pass from one idiosyncratic
personal atmosphere into another almost as if we were turning over a
photograph album.

If we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce
themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage
in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so
many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole
drift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience,
and on the whole _preferred_--there is no other truthful word--as
one's best working attitude. Cynical characters take one general
attitude, sympathetic characters another. But no general attitude
is possible towards the world as a whole, until the intellect has
developed considerable generalizing power and learned to take pleasure
in synthetic formulas. The thought of very primitive men has hardly
any tincture of philosophy. Nature can have little unity for savages.
It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a checkered play of light and