a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a
professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends
itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences
is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No
faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends and
colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they
soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only
partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder
of pragmatism himself recently gave a course of lectures at the
Lowell Institute with that very word in its title-flashes of
brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I
fancy, understood ALL that he said--yet here I stand, making a very
similar venture.

I risk it because the very lectures I speak of DREW--they brought
good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious
fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we
nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill,
we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a
smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good
and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears.
Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's
queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and
ingenuity.

Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a
kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled,
per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the
situation.