has an upholding strength that is marvelous, and the most refractory ores, requiring the greatest heat, can be easily and successfully reduced in a furnace fed by it.

But this is only one phase of his new invention. By a careful and studious arrangement-in which work Professor Lowe's peculiar genius manifests itself— a plant is secured which, under one roof and one management, and at scarcely more than the cost of operation of an ordinary gas plant, and at little more than the original cost of a fair-sized gas or electric-light plant, produces the following: coke, which supplies all the hard fuel of the community; gas, for lighting, cooking and heating; artificial ice and refrigeration; with steam and electric power for sale for all manufac turing purposes, or even for the operation of an electric railway. Think what such a plant would mean to a small community! By its means these luxuries of the highest civilization, which have hitherto been confined to the larger cities, are put within the reach of the humblest, for the cost is so materially

reduced that the common laborer can well afford to use gas for cooking and electric light in his humble cottage, while ice from the same plant keeps the milk, meat and vegetable supply of the family sweet and pure.

There need be no wonder, then, that with such a long and successful life of useful and helpful invention behind him, the people of his native village in New Hampshire showed desire to do him especial honor on his seventy-fifth birthday, which occurred on the 20th of August last. At the time of his birth, in 1832, the place was called Jefferson Mills, but as there were several "Jeffer

sons

near by, it was deemed advisable to change the name to Riverton. It is now on the line of the Maine Central. A fine flag-pole was secured from the slopes of Mt. Starr King, surmounted with a golden ball, painted and erected, and on the appointed day over a thousand people asembled from all the region round about in carriages, buggies, tallyhos, phaëtons, straw wagons, automobiles and by railway train, to witness the raising of a monster 20 by 30 feet

United States flag, especially presented to his townsmen by Professor Lowe. Ex-Governor Chester B. Jordan of New Hampshire presided and in most happy vein related incidents connected with the Lowe family of seventy-five and more years ago. He extolled the spirit of this poor, barefooted lad who went out into the world to benefit and bless his fellows, educating himself and placing his name high on the mountain of fame by his own unaided efforts. Two local poets read or sang odes in honor of their townsman, and the great audience joined in the song heartily and cheered lustily when another speaker gave a brief account of Professor Lowe's inventions and achievements. The Rev. Dr. Logue, one of the best known and loved of the ministers of New Hampshire, made a telling speech and fairly electrified the audience, when he dedicated the chapel (before which the ceremonies took place and which was built on the site of the old Lowe homestead) as the Lowe Memorial Union Chapel. A beautiful black and gold tablet has since been

placed over the doorway of the chapel, bearing the following inscription:

Lowe Memorial Union Chapel Dedicated to the Glory of God and the benefit of humanity on the seventy-fifth birthday of Thaddeus S. C. Lowe

August 20, 1907.

A battery of cannon fired a salute of seventy-five guns and solid and liquid refreshments were served with generous liberality to all who were present.

It was throughout a most enjoyable affair, because of the marked spontaneity of the feelings of the people who had gladly assembled to give honor to Professor Lowe, and the unanimous feeling of all the observers was that as a genuine outpouring of popular feeling and as a tribute of high esteem its spirit and observance was perfect. A fitting conclusion is found in the fact that the citizens have now set on foot a movement to again and finally change the name of their town, this time giving it the name they all delight to honor,-that of their distinguished citizen, Lowe.

GEORGE WHARTON JAMES
Pasadena, California.

TH

PART I. PLATO, AND

HAT the services which philosophy has been able to render the cause of religion, while of great and acknowledged value, are yet of a purely negative character, is vouched for by no less an authority than the great Immanuel Kant in the following language: "The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason is, after all, merely negative, since it serves, not as an organon for the enlargement [of knowledge], but as a discipline for its delimitation; and instead of discovering truth, has only the

discursive thought, or greater subtlety of discrimination, or profounder insight into purely philosophic problems. Greek philosophy meant Greek culture; and, for several centuries both before and after the Christian era, that meant, practically, the culture, education, and enlightenment of the world. Furthermore, the philosophy of the Greeks constituted their religion, as distinctly as Hebrew sacred literature expressed the religion of the Hebrews. The Greeks, like their great forbears, the Egyptians, were an exceedingly reverent people, exceedingly religious, whose ideas of God and the worship due Him surpassed in important respects any nation of their time, not excepting the Hebrews. While the Jews were offering to God the blood of goats and rams and were thinking of Him in anthropomorphic images as a conquering and terrible Jehovah who would appear to avenge the wrongs of the Jewish nation by slaughtering and subduing other nations-Plato was teaching the Greeks that God is Mind, Wisdom, the supreme Good, and that the summum bonum of individual man is union with God by assimilation to Him in character. This was really Plato's idea of the atonement. The soul had lost its primitive purity and oneness with God and become immeshed in sensuous elements of which the corporeal body is the grossest expression and most hindering incumbrance in man's struggle to regain his primitive estate of blessedness. "Philosophy is with Plato as with Socrates, not something purely theoretical, but the return of the soul to its true nature, a spiritual regeneration in which the soul regains its lost knowledge of the ideal world, and thus the consciousness of its own higher origin, of its original superiority to the sensuous world. In philosophy the mind purifies itself from all admixture of sense; it comes to itself and re-obtains that freedom and rest of which its immersion in the terial had deprived it." Hist. Phil., p. 117.)

ma

(Schwegler's

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Plato's conception of creation is not inferior to any but that of the Bible, if, indeed, it be not in practical accord with that of the first chapter of Genesis. Man and the universe that God created consist of ideas of pure reason, which are perfect and eternal, and exist together in perfect harmony and oneness-as the many in one-in God, as archetypes, after which an inferior deity called a Demiurge patterned, with more or less faithful imitation, the sensuous or material universe. Plato evidently considered that God is "of purer eyes than to behold evil” (Habakkuk, 1: 13), and so he assigned the work of fashioning a material world to an inferior deity. 'With Plato Greek philosophy reached the highest point of its development. The Platonic system is the first complete construction of the entire natural and spiritual universe in accordance with one single philosophical principle; it is the type of all higher speculation, of all metaphysical as well as ethical idealism." (Schweg., Hist. Phil., 124.) Aristotle says: "Plato came to the doctrine of ideas because he was convinced of the truth of the Heraclitic view which regarded the sensible world as a ceaseless flowing and changing. His conclusion from this was, that if there be a science of any thing there must be, besides the sensible, other substances which have permanence, for there can be no science of the fleeting." From Parmenides I quote what Socrates is made to say of these Ideas: "The more probable view, Parmenides, of these ideas is, that they are patterns fixed in nature, and that other things are like them, and resemblances of them; and that what is meant by the participation of other things in the ideas, is really assimilation to them." (Jowett's Plato, Vol. III., 249.) Plato was the first to recognize the ideas of pure reason as having objective existence as real living entities; and the first to realize that neither knowledge, nor science, nor being, is possible on any other basis. His separation between the real spiritual

universe of Ideas and its sensuous unreal imitation was radical and complete. Aristotle, his illustrious disciple, was the first to attempt a reconciliation between them, and so became the father of modern materialism, and the Esau of philosophy. For, philosophy has had its Esaus as truly as religion. Men who failed to estimate spiritual values at their proper worth; who do not belong to the spiritual succession. It was so with Plato; it was so with his illustrious and only worthy successor, Immanuel Kant. Ever since the days of Kant there have been philosophers, the Esaus of the decadence, ready to explain how Kant missed his way, and failed to bridge the impassable gulf between the spiritual and the sensuous, which neither he nor father Abraham could see a way to bridge.

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Schopenhauer, one of Kant's greatest interpreters, says of him: Kant's greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself, based upon the proof that between things and us there still always stands the intellect, so that they may not be known as they may be in themselves.

"Now as Kant's separation of the phenomenon from the thing in itself, arrived at in the manner explained above, far surpassed all that preceded it in the depth and thoughtfulness of its conception, it was also exceedingly important in its results. For in it he propounded, quite originally, in a perfectly new way, found from a new side and on a new path, the same truth which Plato never wearies of repeating, and in his language generally expresses thus: This world which appears to the senses has no true being, but only a ceaseless becoming; it is, and it is not, and its comprehension is not so much knowledge as illusion. . . “The same truth, again quite differently presented, is also a leading doctrine of the Vedas and Puranas. . . . But Kant not only expressed the same doctrine in a completely new and original way, but raised it to the position of proved and indisputable truth by means

of the calmest and most temperate exposition; while both Plato and the Indian philosophers had founded their assertions merely upon a general perception of the world, had advanced them as the direct utterances of their consciousness, and presented them rather mythically and poetically than philosophically and distinctly. Such distinct knowledge and calm, thoughtful exposition of this dream-like nature of the whole world is really the basis of the whole Kantian philosophy; it is its soul and its greatest merit. He accomplished this by taking to pieces the whole machinery of our intellect by means of which the phantasmagoria of the objective world is brought about, and presenting it in detail with marvelous insight and ability." (World as Will and Idea, II., 6-9.)

We are, accordingly, not surprised to find Professor Heinze in his Observations on Kant's Lectures on Metaphysics, quoting in support of this view the following from the Critique of Pure Reason (German edition):

"One may use as a weapon against materialism the argument that the separation from the body is the end of our sense knowledge and the beginning of our intellectual knowledge. The body helps the sensual and animal part, but hinders the spiritual part of our nature. And against other criticisms of the doctrine of Immortality one may adduce the transcendental hypothesis: 'All life is essentially only intellectual and not subject to time changes, neither beginning with birth nor ending with death. This world's life is only an appearance, a sensuous image of the pure spiritual life, and the whole world of sense only a picture swimming before our present knowing faculty like a dream, and having no reality in itself. For if we should see things and ourselves as they are we would see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures with which our entire real relation neither began at birth nor ended with the body's death.""

Kant criticizes Plato's division of the world into the mundus sensibilis or world of sense appearance, and the mundus intelligibilis or world of Ideas of the pure reason, calls Plato "the sublime philosopher," and says: "In this distinction, Plato is quite right. It is the beginning of all sound philosophy to recognize that bodies are not absolutely real, but only mere appearances. But he is wrong in holding that the mundus intelligibilis is the real object of the knowledge of the understanding. On the contrary, it is the mundus sensibilis to which the human understanding is adapted. Its concepts have value for knowledge only as functions for the construction of phenomena." (Paulsen's Kant, p. 200.)

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Paulsen speaks of Kant's "doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason" as the coping stone of the Kantian philosophy;" and adds: "It is a protest against attcahing too much importance to [physical] science, and estimating too highly its importance for life, as had been the fashion since the days of the revival of learning. . . . So long as one believes that through science and philosophy it was possible to obtain absolute insight into the nature of things, and the being of God, these things appeared to have some part in constituting the dignity of man. Now Kant declares that knowledge of this kind is absolutely impossible, and in its place he sets practical faith [i. e., practical reason], which rests solely on the good will, not on knowledge and demonstration. And this faith is the only way of approach to the super-sensible world, which through it stands open to all alike, to all, that is, of good will. Learning of the schools, theology, and metaphysics are of no advantage here." (Ibid., pp. 341-2.) In other words, since "It is the very essence of the Kantian idealism that objects are not there till they are thought" (see Caird's Kant); that is, since the human or mortal or carnal mind is the creator of the sense-world, so its knowl

edge-all the knowing of which it is in any wise capable-is confined to the objects of its own creating, that is to its own ideas, or the so-called physical phenomena; "for the natural man can not know "the things of the Spirit of God" (1 Cor., 2: 14), which are the ideas of the pure, or practical reason. Plato and the schoolmen thought different, and it was Kant's great work to destroy this illusion. It was a treacherous claim to knowledge which Kant, under the awakening touch of Hume, realized was fraught with dire calamity to religion, and which he accordingly undertook to destroy. This he accomplished through his "delimitation" of human knowledge, as I have endeavored to explain. Kant says: "I had to destroy [sham] knowledge to make room for [rational] faith." (Critique, 2d ed., Pref.)

In this distinction which Kant recognized between the human understanding and the divine understanding or practical reason-Kant meaning by practical reason the divine Reason, i. e., God, the source of all reality and all real knowing consists, doubtless, the greatest service he was able to render to the cause of religion. By it he administers a rebuke to the foolish pretentions of human wisdom scarcely less severe than Paul administers in the first two chapters of his first letter to the Corinthians. It is clearly the distinction which our Saviour recognized when He blessed Simon's confession that He was the Christ, "for flesh and blood [i. e., human understanding] hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father [i. e., divine Mind] which is in heaven." Others had made this confession before, doubtless Simon Peter had, certainly Nathanael had; and even the devils knew that He was the Christ. (Luke, 4:41.) But they provoked no such remarkable statement from Jesus. Not until the Master recognized Peter's spiritual growth and that he had his knowledge as a communication from the one Mind does he regard it as a confession on which to build his Church.