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This admission is not new either in philosophy or science. It is obviously a necessary axiom for those philosophers who insist that reality is a system. In these lectures we are keeping off the profound and vexed question as to what we mean by 'reality. I am maintaining the humbler thesis that nature is a system.

The small success, which has been met with in all the attempts to fix this power, has at last obliged philosophers to conclude, that the ultimate force and efficacy of nature is perfectly unknown to us, and that it is in vain we search for it in all the known qualities of matter.

Against this error that Master of Philosophers, Aristotle, guards, in the beginning of the book of Ethics, when he says: "If the friends are two, and one is the Truth, their one mind is the Truth's." If I have said that I am not reverent, that is, to deny reverence, or by a manifest sign to deny or refuse a submission not due.

Numerous facts combine to show us that the philosophical wisdom of the Greeks rested on the same mental basis as mystical knowledge. We only understand the great philosophers when we approach them with feelings gained through study of the Mysteries. With what veneration does Plato speak of the "secret doctrines" in the Phædo.

Nay, more; Alcidamas, an ancient rhetorician of the very highest reputation, wrote even in praise of death, which he endeavored to establish by an enumeration of the evils of life; and his Dissertation has a great deal of eloquence in it; but he was unacquainted with the more refined arguments of the philosophers.

He places no part of his happiness in ostentation, but in the secret approbation of his conscience, seeking the reward of his virtue, not in the clamorous applauses of the world, but in the silent satisfaction which results from having acted well. In short, you will not easily find his equal, even among our philosophers by outward profession.

Besides books like those of Marco Polo and John Mandeville and the Bishop of Cambrai he had studied philosophers and the ancients and Scripture and the Fathers. He spoke unwaveringly of prophecies, explicit and many, of his voyage, and the rounding out of earth by him, Christopherus Columbus.

And here I must pay my tribute to the admirable qualities of our horses steady, prompt and courageous; no mountain too steep for them to climb, no precipice too abrupt to descend; and they stood the pelting of that pitiless storm like four-legged philosophers. We found Bailey's house apparently full, but they made room for us.

"It was not for this that I raised him," she said to me bitterly. "It was not for this! The whole thing is wrong, and it is just as hard on the German women as on us!" Even in her sorrow she had the universal outlook the very thing that so many philosophers declare that women have not got!

The acknowledgment of this fact is religiousness; the contrary of it is irreligiousness and anthropomorphistic arrogance, even if it appears in the name of religiousness. A comparison of the two philosophers is interesting. In one direction, Lange does more justice to the religious need than Spencer does.