his definitions, is "a mere idea of a possible science which exists nowhere in the concrete but which we try to approach on different paths."

I occasionally read a little philosophy as a recreation, and so I have read Mr. Jones's paper. I have tried hard to find the meaning of it and to follow his argument to the effect that philosophy is of benefit to the engineering student, but I must confess that I am not quite clear as to what he means in many of his paragraphs and I fail to see that he has proved at all that philosophy ought to be studied by an engineer to any more serious extent than he should study any one of the long catalogue of things that I have named above. Any man who makes a hobby of one subject is apt to appreciate its value to far greater extent than his neighbors, and it is all right of course for him to preach about his hobby and try to get his neighbors to believe in it, but he must not be disappointed if they are so much taken up with their own hobbies as to have no time for any of his.

To criticize Mr. Jones's paper throughout would involve the writing of a longer article than the paper itself and I do not believe that our Proceedings would be benefited by any such article. I will only say that I not only differ with him as regards the benefit of philosophy to an engineering student, but also think a great many of his dogmatic statements are entirely wrong. For instance, his statement, "Our ability to grasp the nature of things depends upon the ratio of the rate of change taking place in them to the rate of change of our conscious activities." Let us consider the diamond. Does our ability to grasp as much as

the sciences of chemistry, crystallography, optics and mechanics have revealed to us concerning the diamond depend upon the ratio of the rate of change taking place in the diamond to the rate of change of our conscious activities? Again, "The only possible comparison of the worth of individual life is whether the sum is fuller consciousness or not." The sentence is rhetorically defective in that it does not show whether the worth of an individual life to one's self is meant or the worth to humanity. If the sentence means that the life which has the fuller consciousness is the more valuable then I must take exception to it. Suppose the concept should be toothache or corns! In that case, the fuller consciousness is not to be desired.

MR. BASSETT JONES, JR.: My paper was given its full mete of criticism before it aroused Mr. Kent's merriment. It was submitted both to those whose judgment in matters of philosophy would, I believe, be generally recognized as adequate, and also to my school-boy brother in order to discover whether the argument was expressed in a form that would be ordinarily clear. I do not lay claim to any special ability in the matter of clear-written expression, but I did believe that I had so addressed my paper that its meaning and purpose could be grasped by people of ordinary intelligence. That my argument has not seemed clear, to Mr. Kent at least, is to me a source of keen disappointment!

Mr. Kent enunciates a variegated list of subjects, which he truly says should command the interest of every educated man. But the interest which each of these subjects will have for any individual will be

tempered largely, I take it, by the individual's own ideals and his general attitude to life-in other words, by his philosophy. What place the individual will give to politics, biology, ionization of matter, literature, sociology, or what-not, and what bearings he will conceive that any or all of these subjects have upon his own life will, of course, depend on what theory of reality he holds, and on what relations he considers that reality bears to himself. His opinions of the nature of the cosmos of which he forms a part may not be definitely articulated in his mind, but he nevertheless guides his life, and therefore indirectly helps to guide the life of others by these opinions.

But with the rise of society comes the necessity of unity in belief and action-and by society I mean that "socius," or relation of alter and ego, that is moulded, not by mere sympathy and intellectuality as such, but by the highest ethical influence, namely the category of the "ought.”

If then we are to work together for the common good we must set before ourselves an ideal end that will at the same time be one for all good citizens and many for the separate individuals. The ideal must be such that all can strive for it alike, and yet the paths by which we, severally, can reach for it may be diverse. You and I, each one of us, must make our lives such that while we each pursue our separate specialties, we are yet working together to better ourselves as a collective whole. To do this we must, so to speak, pool our interests, beliefs and actions in order that we may achieve that common destiny which the psychologist, sociologist and philosopher alike

point out as the object indicated by the "set" of organic development.

Now since life is moulded by beliefs and ideals, and since the descriptive science, for lack of a better expression, of beliefs and ideals is philosophy, it seems reasonable that if society as a whole is to fulfill its manifest destiny, then each one of its members, in a general way at least, must hold a philosophy that will not clash with the philosophy of his neighbor. And to achieve this result the youth, the unfledged member of society, must have his ideals suitably moulded. It is not so much the question of the benefit of philosophy to the individual as it is the necessity that every member of society be trained to so order his life that there will be as little friction as possible between his life and the larger life of the socius of which he forms a part.

At one time I thought that this training of students to common ideals might be accomplished by teaching them technical philosophy. I wish now to modify that statement in so far as to say that whether technical philosophy is included in the curriculum or not, the student must be given the philosophic attitude of mind. He must become a man of social ideals, and I can not see that this requirement need conflict with the requirement that he become also a man of affairs.

I have no time or space to further develop my argument. I should like to refer Mr. Kent to the following forcible statements of the same principle in education, "The Danger of Over-specialization," by Dr. L. H. Baekeland, in Science of May 31, 1907, and "The Human Side of the Engineering Profession,"

by Professor V. Karepetoff, a paper read before the New York Electrical Society in 1907.

Technical philosophy may, and fortunately for society does, become a hobby with men of a certain cast of intellect. It is also fortunate that certain other men make a hobby of mechanics. The former run the danger of becoming purely idealistic, the latter too often become essentially materialistic, and each group, failing to see that both are wrong, will be prone to laugh and sneer. There is, however, a neutral ground where each may learn the lesson of moderation and learn it they must, sooner or later.

I think we may find two examples of this failure to see the other side of the argument in Mr. Kent's discussion of my paper.

1. Mr. Kent tells us that occasionally he reads a little philosophy himself. Unfortunately, he has not kept himself abreast of the times and has been led into the error of mistaking his own ignorance of recent philosophical development for a general loss of interest in the subject. Within the last fifty years we have Huxley, Spencer, Ritchie, Green, Caird, Bosanquet, Ward, Dewey, Royce, Pierce, Bradley, and a host of German and French philosophers of the Hegelian school, to mention only a few of the greater lights. You may be surprised to find Huxley's name in this list, but Huxley has been second only to Spencer in recognizing the essential relations of science and philosophy, and in interpreting for the masses the great movement inaugurated by Kant and Hegel. Darwin, too, has much to say in this connection. (Mr. Kent might with profit read Ritchie's