for human happiness that children should be shut out of a true liberal education ?-then the question takes on a different look. In other words, the question of mere production tends to fall into the background, the question of the end or meaning of it takes the front place.

The

The same is true in relation to the question, What trade unions have done. It is extremely difficultmuch more than you would suppose at first-to prove that trade unions have actually raised wages. more you hear and see and read, the more difficult you find it to answer that economic question. But when you come to the other side, to the ethical question, Have trade unions raised the working classes? have they made the working classes more respected and selfrespecting ?-that is a very different problem, and I have no difficulty in answering that.

It is very

"The living wage" is another case. difficult to prove economically that the living wage is a good thing, though I think the case here is stronger than the economic argument in favour of trade unions. But when you come to the ethical question, and ask what the depression, the degradation, of sinking below the living wage means for the individual, for his wife and family, then you come to a clear issue. The whole question takes a new aspect; it becomes a more serious and interesting one.

The ideal of general progress is another ethical question, which it has struck me that economists tend to ignore, to the detriment of their treatment of their own specific problem. What is meant by progress in the working class, or any other class? Does it mean merely increase of desires? I read a good many political economy books, and those that are better

disposed denounce the want of desires, the want of a standard of life, the want of tastes among the working classes; they suggest that the great thing is to create desires in the working classes, in order that they may demand higher wages. They appeal to what the Germans call the "verdammte Bedürflosigkeit" in the working classes. But surely we cannot treat this increase of desires as itself a good, apart from the quality and organisation of the desires. It is easy enough to create desires and tastes. I take it a taste for loafing and the racecourse is easily enough acquired. It is the quality of the desires that we should look to. The need of the working classes is the chance of developing better desires and of subordinating them to a true conception of life. I need not go on; the general conclusion is plain. At every point our social problems open out upon ethical problems, and no one can deal with them satisfactorily who "hath not deeply meditated upon the human mind and upon the summum bonum."

It was this conviction which led me to take an interest in the foundation of a School of Ethics and Social Philosophy. I think, if the school can take up that position, can force those who are interested in such questions to face them from this point of view, to treat laws and institutions from the point of view of their effect upon human character and the ultimate ideal of the community, they will have done something worth doing, and something not yet done in connection with our social problems in London.

I have said a great deal about philosophy and the study of philosophy; and perhaps there are some here who are rather more of beginners than myself, to

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whom, without offence, I might venture to offer, in closing, one or two pieces of practical advice on this head.

The first piece of advice that it strikes me to give, from my own experience and circumstances, is, Do not begin at the end; do not begin at the difficult things in philosophy. Do not begin, for instance, with Hegel's Logic, or even with Bosanquet's Logic. If you do that, you will be like one who sets about the study of mathematics beginning with the differential calculus. Those who are beginners must be content with something a little more elementary and attractive-the Dialogues of Plato must come before the Critiques of Kant. About these there is now no difficulty, with the translations and commentaries that we have in English. Following on the Dialogues come the Ethics, with the first two and the last book of the Politics of Aristotle. Of modern books, besides old Locke, there are the Principles of Bishop Berkeley, from which I have quoted, and the Essays of Hume-all in cheap editions now. There are Mill's works-his Liberty, his Utilitarianism, his Discussions, the last book of the Logic, not sufficiently read by students.

Then there is Caird's Hegel, in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics; Mr. Bosanquet's smaller works; all that Professor Wallace has written-beginning with his biographies of Schopenhauer, Kant, and Epicurus; and perhaps more than all, the recently published Philosophical Lectures and Remains of R. L. Nettleship, beginning with the Biography by his friend Professor Bradley. From these last alone you will have a very fair idea of what philosophy is, what a fine mind like Nettleship's made of it, and what a fine man it made of him.

In the next place, take my advice, and do not read Elements and Outlines. You may be sure that this advice is quite disinterested, because I have written Elements myself. Get to the great writers. Go to their own works, for philosophy is really not a dogma, not a system of doctrines. It is a way of looking at the world of knowledge and experience which you can best acquire by trying to put yourself in the position of a great mind which has consciously adopted it.

Do not be alarmed at the multitude of philosophers and philosophies. It does not really matter much which of the great writers you take up-Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Green. The man who refuses to read a particular philosopher because he does not give us "philosophy," Hegel said, is like the man who refuses to take cherries or pears because they are not "fruit." There is no such thing as philosophy in general, any more than there is fruit in general.

You may begin really with any. There is none of them, we may admit, that has a divine origin, and is infallible; and, as Socrates says in the Phado, when we cannot get a divine discourse to sail in, as in a ship, we must take the best human discourse that is open to us, and, greatly daring, sail on it through life as upon a raft.

The last thing that suggests itself to me is: Do not suppose that, in order to live and think philosophically, you require to think about things that you find in the philosophical text-books. Do not, e.g., think that it is necessary to follow "the dance of bloodless categories" that Hegel leads us in his Logic. Here, also, it does not matter where you begin. Listen to what Nettleship, whose Remains I quote again, says

on this: "If I had to begin over again, I should like to try to master the elements of a few big things. Till I have done this, the rest is all confusion, and talking about it is beating the air. And whenever I at all understand the elements, I seldom find much difficulty in finding applications everywhere. Anything presents every kind of problem; and I can't help thinking that it would be much better for many metaphysically minded people if they would think about things which they happen to feel and have real experience of, instead of taking their subjects and lines of thought from other people's systems."

"Anything," he says, "presents every kind of problem." All roads lead to Rome; all subjects followed. far enough will take us to the centre. They lead to the Whole; and philosophy is really only a particularly determined attempt to follow out the path of knowledge or experience that any one of us happens to have chosen for himself.