no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any
moral interest in the interpretation of nature. Artists have no less
talent than ever; their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often
interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in
their works.

In philosophy there are always the professors, as in art there are
always the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and
both sorts of academicians are often very expert and well-educated.
Yet in philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and
endowed systems, there has been of late a very interesting fresh
movement, largely among the professors themselves, which in its
various hues may be called irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or
pure empiricism. But this movement, far from being a reawakening of
any organising instinct, is simply an extreme expression of romantic
anarchy. It is in essence but a franker confession of the principle
upon which modern philosophy has been building--or unbuilding--for
these three hundred years, I mean the principle of subjectivity.
Berkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the school, taught that
experience is not a partial discovery of other things but is itself
the only possible object of experience. Therefore, said Kant and the
second generation of prophets, any world we may seem to live in, even
those worlds of theology or of history which Berkeley or Hume had
inadvertently left standing, must be an idea which our present
experience suggests to us and which we frame as the principles of our
mind allow and dictate that we should. But then, say the latest
prophets--Avenarius, William James, M. Bergson--these mental
principles are no antecedent necessities or duties imposed on our
imagination; they are simply parts of flying experience itself, and
the ideas--say of God or of matter--which they lead us to frame have