xii HUMANISM 



to complete the doctrine of the rest. And the old material 

 also has been thoroughly revised and considerably aug 

 mented. So that I am not without hopes that the 

 collection, though discontinuous in form, will be found to 

 be coherent in substance, and to present successive aspects 

 of a fairly systematic body of doctrine. To me at least 

 it has seemed that, when thus taken collectively, these 

 essays not only reinforced my previous contentions, but 

 even supplied the ground for a further advance of the 

 greatest importance. 



It is clear to all who have kept in touch with the 

 pulse of thought that we are on the brink of great events 

 in those intellectual altitudes which a time-honoured satire 

 has described as the intelligible world. The ancient 

 shibboleths encounter open yawns and unconcealed deri 

 sion. The rattling of dry bones can no longer fascinate 

 respect nor plunge a self-suggested horde of fakirs in 

 hypnotic stupor. The agnostic maunderings of impotent 

 despair are flung aside with a contemptuous smile by the 

 young, the strong, the virile. And there is growing up a 

 reasonable faith that even the highest peaks of speculation 

 may prove accessible to properly-equipped explorers, while 

 what seemed so unapproachable was nothing but a cloud- 

 land of confused imaginings. Among the more marked 

 symptoms that the times are growing more propitious to 

 new philosophic enterprise, I would instance the conspicuous 

 success of Mr. Balfour s Foundations of Belief ; the magnifi 

 cent series of William James s popular works, The Will to 

 Believe, Human Immortality, and The Varieties of Religious 

 Experience ; James Ward s important Gifford Lectures on 

 Naturalism and Agnosticism ; the emergence from Oxford, 

 where the idealist enthusiasm of thirty years ago long 

 seemed to have fossilized into sterile logic-chopping or to 

 have dissolved into Bradleian scepticism, of so audacious a 

 manifesto as Personal Idealism ; and most recently, but not 



