PREFACE 



The following lectures 1 are an attempt to show, by means 

 of examples, the nature, capacity, and limitations of the 

 logical-analytic method in philosophy. This method, of 

 which the first complete example is to be found in the 

 writings of Frege, has gradually, in the course of actual 

 research, increasingly forced itself upon me as something 

 perfectly definite, capable of embodiment in maxims, and 

 adequate, in all branches of philosophy, to yield whatever 

 objective scientific knowledge it is possible to obtain. 

 Most of the methods hitherto practised have professed 

 to lead to more ambitious results than any that logical 

 analysis can claim to reach, but unfortunately these results 

 have always been such as many competent philosophers 

 considered inadmissible. Regarded merely as hypotheses 

 and as aids to imagination, the great systems of the past 

 serve a very useful purpose, and are abundantly worthy 

 of study. But something different is required if philo- 

 sophy is to become a science, and to aim at results inde- 

 pendent of the tastes and temperament of the philosopher 

 who advocates them. In what follows, I have endeavoured 

 to show, however imperfectly, the way by which I believe 

 that this desideratum is to be found. 



The central problem by which I have sought to illus- 

 trate method is the problem of the relation between the 

 crude data of sense and the space, time, and matter of 



1 Delivered as Lowell Lectures in Boston, in March and April 1914. 



v 



