128 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



to quite recent times, British philosophy was pre- 

 eminently moral philosophy. Even the highly important 

 investigations of Locke, which inaugurated the modern 

 Theory of Knowledge and the more recent researches in 

 Psychology, were originally prompted by a desire to 

 prepare the ground for the discussion and solution of 

 ethical problems. And down to quite recent times, 

 there is a well-marked inclination in English thought, 

 again and again to revert to the discussion of ethical 

 rather than metaphysical questions. Metaphysics, on 

 the other hand, which on the Continent forms the 

 unbroken thread connecting the philosophical systems 

 from Descartes to Lotze, has never continuously and 

 consistently formed the subject of British thought. 

 This has, since the time of Bacon, prided itself 

 rather on finding its way out of metaphysics and 

 reverting to common-sense. And, so far as the theory 

 of knowledge is concerned, it has more than once ended 

 in scepticism or agnosticism, for which maladies the 

 cure had to be found equally in an assertion of the 

 evidence of common -sense. If moral philosophy is 

 thus peculiarly an English province of thought, it is also 

 that department in which English thought has been least 

 affected by foreign thinkers, even less than psychology, 

 in which the now widespread influence of the physio- 

 logical and physical sciences has been mainly imported 

 from abroad. 

 2. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, Ethics 



New be- 

 ginnings has become the leading subject of philosophical discussion 



of ethics in . . 



and'pYance ^^^ ^^^Y ^^ ^^^^ couutry but likewise in Germany and 

 France. In Germany indeed, it had received a great 



