OF REALITY. 



527 



Existence fairly and impartially. And this means that 

 the problem of Eeality has risen from being of purely 

 speculative interest to the position of a fundamental 

 practical problem. The problem which Hume formulated 

 and abandoned, and which Carlyle fantastically adum- 

 brated in the " Everlasting No " and the " Everlasting 

 Yea" of Sartor Kesartus, has gradually dawned upon 

 living thinkers as the great question on which all our 

 culture, civilisation, and progress ultimately depend. 

 Through ' Philosophic Doubt ' we are seeking the ' Path- 

 way to Eeality.' x 



The beginnings of these two independent movements 56. 

 reach indeed as far back as the middle of the century, movements 



' of search m 



and find, inter alia, an expression in John Stuart Mill's Realistic 1 

 famous dictum, that every thinking Englishman was f s n wc! dei 

 either a Coleridgian or a Benthamite. The two move- 

 ments identified by Mill with these celebrated names 

 grew in importance, definiteness, and volume through 

 different alliances which each of them contracted. The 

 movement which, in the opinion of Mill, centred in 

 Bentham, but really quite as much in the teachings of 

 his father, James Mill, sought a deeper foundation in 

 the study of logic and psychology, and was, through 

 these studies, brought into connection with the natural 

 sciences, the methods of which it very largely took as its 

 models. The other movement had already in the mind 

 of Coleridge two distinct sides the philosophical and 

 romantic side, and the poetical and naturalistic side. 



1 This way of putting the matter 

 was suggested to me by a passage 

 which I cannot trace stating 

 that students in some foreign Eng- 



lish missionary college asked for 

 such books as Balfour's ' Defence of 

 Philosophic Doubt' and Haldane's 

 ' Pathway to Reality.' 



