INTRODUCTION. 29 



probably not equalled the ideal greatness of Greece in 

 the Periclean age, the brilliancy of the Kenaissance in 

 Italy, or the great discoveries of the sixteenth and seven- 

 teenth centuries in France and England. But what our 

 century has done is this : it has worked out and deposited 4. 



Nineteenth 



in special terms of language a clearer view of the correct 

 methods for extending knowledge, and a peculiar concep- ^Method 

 tion of its possible unity. At one time and that not edgeT!un- 



, ity of know- 



Very long ago the word truth seemed to indicate to the ledge. 

 seeker not only the right method and road for attaining 

 knowledge, but also the end, the crown of knowledge. 

 " Truth, and nothing but truth," seems still to the popular 

 mind the right maxim for seeking knowledge the whole 

 truth stands before it as the unity of all knowledge, were 

 it found. I think it is now sufficiently clear to the scien- 5 . 

 tific inquirer, as well as to the philosopher, that love of truth not 



the end of 



truth, while it does indeed denote the moral attitude of the oniTtheTt- 

 inquiring mind, is insufficient to define either the path or th"fn q u f ir. 

 the end of knowledge. " What is truth ? " is still the un- 1D 

 solved question. The criteria of truth are still unsettled. 

 It would, indeed, be a sorrowful experience, a calamity of 

 unparalleled magnitude, if ever the moral ideas of truth 

 and faith should disappear out of the soul of either the 

 active worker or the inquiring thinker; but it is with 

 these as with other treasures of our moral nature, such as 

 goodness and holiness, beauty and poetry our knowledge 

 of them does not begin, nor does it increase, by definition ; 

 and though in the unthinking years of our childhood we 

 acquire and appropriate these moral possessions through 

 the words of our mother-tongue, they rarely gain in depth 

 or meaning by logical distinctions which we may learn, 



