Here are two sciences—Philosophy and Political Economy—both bankrupt. The one went through the courts at least a hundred years ago and is now a cheery old bankrupt, bright and garrulous in old age. It talks most interestingly about its case, citing a long list of opinions and judgments that go back to the Greeks. The other bankrupt has just been thrown into the receiver's hands, still protesting angrily, still claiming that it has wonderful assets, that everything will be all right. It cites a wilderness, not of opinion, but of statistics and facts, all apparently bearing on nothing, gets confused, breaks down and cries—a very picture of senile collapse.

There are those who dislike metaphor; let us say the same thing in a plain way. Philosophy means the attempt to discover the ultimate nature of existence, of consciousness, of time and space. Has it found it? No. Is it going to? Not a chance of it. Where is it? Nowhere. Some people do not understand this. They read of the work of the Mayos and the Carrels and the Rutherfords and think that they are getting somewhere. In the philosophical sense it is not so. No ultimate dissection of the human body will ever find the human soul. The substitution of Rutherford's atom for Huxley's—replacing a solid particle infinitely small by a huge cavern empty except for centres of force—does not carry us one inch further in our quest of the final relations of mind and matter. Our greatest medical men know no more of the ultimate nature of consciousness than did a horse doctor in Asia Minor B.C. 500. Einstein, as far as the ultimate truth of space, time, and number goes, is no further on than Rodin's “Penseur”—his statue of the primitive man, buried in stubborn thought and trying, let us say, to think out whether two and two is four, or is five.