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Presidential Address
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Let us now try to gather up our impressions of the present-day thought in regard to the problem of Reality and the connected problem of the theory of knowledge. They are that
1 Materialism in the old sense is dead.
2 So is the commonsense Realism of a former age.
3 Modern Realism is inclining towards Idealism and is sometimes passing into it almost unconsciously.
4 The concrete is preferred to the abstract and the dynamic to the static.
VI The scientific approach to philosophy which has been datailed in the preceding paragraphs has received many protests, checks, modifications and even complete reversal in certain other schools. In England is heard the voice of Humanism through such masters as Balfour, Haldane and Schiller in varying degrees and forms. "Behind all philosophy lies human nature, and in every philosopher there lurks a man.”- is the keynote of this movement. It rejects the universalism and abstractions of Science whose highest ambition is to "depersonalise and dehumanise itself”. It refuses to deify as well as to materialise man. To it, the Absolute is negatrshņıkā. The greatest historical representative of this point of view in the ancient world who made man higher than gods and denounced all seeking after the Absolute, was Gautama Buddha. But his Humanism originated in the riddle of suffering, and ended in asceticism, while the modern Humanist prefers, to enrich life with all goods, and no philosophy or religion would satisfy him "which did not
