CURRENT TENDENCIES 5 



it represents on the whole a decaying force, and it has 

 failed to adapt itself to the temper of the age. Its 

 advocates are, in the main, those whose extra-philosophical 

 knowledge is literary, rather than those who have felt 

 the inspiration of science. There are, apart from reasoned 

 arguments, certain general intellectual forces against it 

 the same general forces which are breaking down the 

 other great syntheses of the past, and making our age 

 one of bewildered groping where our ancestors walked 

 in the clear daylight of unquestioning certainty. 



The original impulse out of which the classical tradition 

 developed was the naive faith of the Greek philosophers 

 in the omnipotence of reasoning. The discovery of 

 geometry had intoxicated them, and its a priori deductive 

 method appeared capable of universal application. They 

 would prove, for instance, that all reality is one, that 

 there is no such thing as change, that the world of sense 

 is a world of mere illusion ; and the strangeness of their 

 results gave them no qualms because they believed in 

 the correctness of their reasoning. Thus it came to be 

 thought that by mere thinking the most surprising and 

 important truths concerning the whole of reality could be 

 established with a certainty which no contrary observations 

 could shake. As the vital impulse of the early philo- 

 sophers died away, its place was taken by authority and 

 tradition, reinforced, in the Middle Ages and almost to 

 our own day, by systematic theology. Modern philosophy, 

 from Descartes onwards, though not bound by authority 

 like that of the Middle Ages, still accepted more or less 

 uncritically the Aristotelian logic. Moreover, it still 

 believed, except in Great Britain, that a priori reasoning 

 could reveal otherwise undiscoverable secrets about the 

 universe, and could prove reality to be quite different 

 from what, to direct observation, it appears to be. It is 



