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Presidential Address
797
he is; " and as observed by Professor Muirhead “Of the general trend of philosophy in our time each writer would probably give a different account and most would experience a certain satisfaction in discovering that it was in the direction of the establishment of his own particular views." Yet, inspite of these difficulties, one need not be chary about forming or expressing his views on the philosophy of his day, even though it may be impossible to eliminate the personal factor. For in the march of philosophy, knowledge grows from more to more, in which every thought matters, no thought is perfect truth, and what Shelley said of Poetry is true of Philosophy that 'it is not an unrelated collection of separate inventions, but a vision of the eternal which all poets"—and we may add philosophers—"like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world." Among 'the co-operating thoughts of this great Mind, the humblest of human thoughts has a place, and this is my apology for attempting a short notice of the main tendencies of contemporary philosophical thought. Owing to obvious limitations of time and space, I cannot undertake to review all the prominent figures of the age, nor a signle one of them completely or even adequately. I shall have to select just a few influential writers by way of illustrating those tendencies and offer my remarks as I pass on. Moreover, much as I wish that it were possible to notice the tendencies in all the branches into which the work of our Congress is divided, I recognise that your time is too valuable to be used up in a preliminary discourse which, after all, is bound to be a cursory aeroplane eye-view.
