182 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



research, or by both combined, as we shall have abun- 

 dant opportunity of showing in detail in the following 

 chapters. 



It is of greater importance for my present purpose to 

 bring under the preliminary notice of my readers the 

 fact that in the course of the last forty years the 

 attitude of the critical mind towards this problem of 

 fundamentals and origins, of the foundations in thought 

 and the beginnings in time, has gradually and radically 

 changed. The confidence with which, from many sides, 

 the ideas of Darwin and Helmholtz were received, has 

 gradually vanished, so far at least as the hope is con- 

 cerned that on those lines of research any finality may 

 be attainable. The study of origins appears to us now 

 to mean, not the study of the beginnings, but only that 

 of an endless process without beginning or end ; the 

 genetic process has reduced itself to a genealogical 

 record. 1 Nor has the study of foundations and funda- 

 mentals revealed to us any secure basis of thought ; it has 

 rather indicated that even the seemingly most certain 

 of sciences, geometry and dynamics, rest upon conven- 

 tional assumptions, as indeed David Hume had already 

 foreshadowed. At the end of the century, the critical 

 mentTueto process has thus not realised the expectations with 



criticism. * 



which both in theoretical and practical questions it 

 was methodically started a hundred and twenty years 

 ago. Rather it has resulted in a general unsettlement 

 favourable both to scepticism and pessimism, and to a 



62. 



Unsettle- 



1 From this point of view the 

 title of Darwin's work is really 

 misleading, as it deals with the 

 problems of transformation and 



descent rather than with that of 

 origin a problem which, as Dar- 

 win himself admitted in later 

 years, was really insoluble. 



