IN an article published in "The Monist" for January, 1891,
I endeavored to show what ideas ought to form the warp
of a system of philosophy, and particularly emphasized
that of absolute chance. In the number of April, 1892, I
argued further in favor of that way of thinking, which it
will be convenient to christen tychism (from τύχη, chance).
A serious student of philosophy will be in no haste to
accept or reject this doctrine; but he will see in it one of
the chief attitudes which speculative thought may take,
feeling that it is not for an individual, nor for an age, to
pronounce upon a fundamental question of philosophy.
That is a task for a whole era to work out. I have begun
by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary
cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of
mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-
fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized
and partially deadened mind. I may mention, for the bene-
fit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies,
that I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord,
-- I mean in Cambridge, -- at the time when Emerson,
Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that
they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus,
from Boehm, or from God knows what minds stricken with
the monstrous mysticism of the East. But the atmosphere

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