time: the refreshing river 



I am glad to confess that, like T. H. Huxley, du Bois Reymond, 

 Ernst Haeckel, and many another better man, I have always been a 

 prowler, an explorer, among ideas. The Sceptical Biologist and the 

 Great Amphibium}- represented a fairly systematic position in the 

 philosophy of science, but as would be expected in a prowler among 

 ideas, this position has during the past ten years undergone a con- 

 siderable reconstruction. The first necessity in introducing the present 

 book is to indicate how it links on with the two former ones. 



The Differentiation of the Forms of Experience. 



The task with which I was mainly occupied in SB and GA was 

 the distinctification and differentiation of the great forms of human 

 experience; science, philosophy, religion, history and art. During the 

 previous ten years I had often been nauseated at the confusion of 

 them all together which is so common among superficial thinkers in 

 pulpits and elsewhere, and I tried therefore to show how different each 

 of them was from the others. Each seemed to lead to a characteristic 

 world-view, incompatible with and sometimes frankly contradictory 

 to those of the others. The proper appreciation of the world by man 

 could not arise, I believed, from the pursuit of any one of diese 

 forms of experience by itself, but rather by the experience of all of 

 them, though there was little or no hope of uniting them into any 

 kind of "philosophia prima" or coherent view of the universe. The 

 use of the word "scepticism" in a title implied, therefore, two things; 

 ■first that I was sceptical of any one of the forms of experience claiming 

 to be a royal road to our appreciation of the world in which we live, 

 and secondly that I was sceptical of the construction of any coherent 

 world-view which would reconcile the conflicting claims of the forms 

 of experience together. In this sense I deliberately use the word 

 "appreciation" instead of understanding or comprehension, for the 

 purely intellectual would at once cut out the contributions of religion 

 and art, forms of experience which have something in common with 

 being in love. A man who had never been in love might give us a 

 proposal for a world-view, but if we knew- this fact about him, we 

 should be right to think twice before accepting it. And the saying of 

 Sir Thomas Browne, "Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, 

 whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in 

 divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds" again em- 

 phasised my scepticism as to the possibility of a coherent world-view. 

 ^ Hereinafter referred to as SB and GA respectively. 



8 



