Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/8

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KNOWING AND ACTING

little of himself: desiring neither fame nor influence, he won the devotion of men and was a power in their lives: and, seeking no disciples, he taught to many the greatness of the world and of man's mind'; of my great Master, Edward Caird—I can use no words less or other than those which disciples in philosophy have loved to repeat whenever Death has severed personal intercourse with a beloved and revered teacher—ἀνήρ, ὡς ἡμεῖς φαῖμεν ἄν, τῶν τότε ὧν ἐπειράθημεν ἄριστος καὶ ἄλλως φρονιμώτατος καὶ δικαιότατος—the wisest and best man we have ever known.

The legislator, as the Greeks would have called him, who framed the brief regulations determining the duties of the Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, describes them in a way which rather sets a problem than furnishes guidance. The Professor, he says, 'shall lecture and give instruction on the principles and history of Mental Philosophy, and on its connexion with Ethics.' He distinguishes two great departments of philosophic thought—so recognizedly distinct as already to be assigned for separate treatment to two other Professors in the University—and he enjoins that they shall be afresh discussed in their connexion with one another, yet with respect for their distinction. It can scarcely be his meaning that his Professor should attempt the invidious task of harmonizing the possibly divergent accounts given of Logic by the Wykeham Professor and of Ethics by Whyte's Professor, of performing in public the higher synthesis of his colleagues' several contributions to philosophic truth, or—less arrogantly—of indicating or reinforcing their latent consonance. Such a task, had it been required or suggested, I could not have