PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 



During the eight years which have elapsed since this 

 Grammar was first published, the views expounded in it 

 have undoubtedly met with wider acceptance than the 

 author in the least anticipated. There are many signs 

 that a sound idealism is surely replacing, as a basis for 

 natural philosophy, the crude materialism of the older 

 physicists. More than one professor of metaphysics has 

 actually discovered that he can best attack " modern " 

 science by criticising ancient statements as to mechanism 

 from a standpoint remarkably similar to that of the 

 Grammar. Step by step men of science are coming to 

 recognise that mechanism is not at the bottom of 

 phenomena, but is only the conceptual shorthand by aid 

 of which they can briefly describe and resume phenomena. 

 That all science is description and not explanation, that 

 the mystery of change in the inorganic world is just as 

 great and just as omnipresent as in the organic world, 

 are statements which will appear platitudes to the next 

 generation. Formerly men had belief as to the super- 

 sensuous, and thought they had knowledge of the 

 sensuous. The science of the future, while agnostic as 

 to the supersensuous, will replace knowledge by belief 

 in the perceptual sphere, and reserve the term knowledge 

 for the conceptual sphere — the region of their own 

 concepts and ideas — of ether, atom, organic corpuscle, and 



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