Book excerpt: Excerpt from Lectures on the Philosophy of Freemasonry These lectures were first delivered before the Harvard Chapter of the Acacia Fraternity in the schoolyear 1911-12, except the lecture on Krause, which was first delivered before the Grand Lodge of Nebraska in 1903, and was originally printed in the proceedings of that body for that year. Afterwards all five lectures, revised and corrected, were delivered before the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts in 1914, and appear in its proceedings for that year. In the latter form they were published in successive numbers of The Builder, from January to May, 1915, from which they are now reprinted. From the foregoing statement it will appear that in their original form all but one of the lectures were prepared for students who had come fresh from a certain general philosophical training in college. Undoubtedly the reader who has not had such a training will find them somewhat difficult. But it is believed the difficulty is involved necessarily in the subject itself. There is no more a popular road to learning than there was once a royal road. Learning which costs no effort is worth no more than it costs. The perennial problems of the nature of reality, the conduct of life, and the relation of the human individual to the universe cannot be stated in words of one syllable, nor can solutions of them which are of enough value to justify the time spent in achieving them, be ladled out as predigested food for mental digestions too weak to assimilate the ideas of Krause and Pike undiluted and untempered. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.