PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XXXV 



he limited the field of our knoivledge to the connect- 

 ing judgments that link our sense-presentations into 

 permanently identical objects in a permanent cosmic 

 whole ; that is, to physical things, and their physical 

 laws, alone. But in so doing he failed to notice what 

 Hume, had the Scottish sceptic lived to read him, 

 could justly have told him reduced all knowledge to 

 an isolated ^^//'-knowledge merely, and thus stripped 

 science of the very quality of triUh, — which required 

 an objective meaning ; a meaning, that is, referred 

 quite beyond any single self, and, indeed, to a world 

 of total and absolute reality. When our assurance 

 of such an absolutely real world is rested simply on 

 our fealty to its idea, the world of supposed science 

 must also, in its turn, become but a world of pure 

 faith — of sheer belief. So futile does our inmost 

 mind declare the endeavour to maintain a judgment 

 of worth for what we cannot crown with the judg- 

 ment of reality. 



Thus, since the counter-attempts of Kant's great 

 idealist successors, following the second branch of 

 the alternative and culminating in the Absolutism 

 of Hegel, philosophy is manifestly at fault before 

 the much profounder dilemma of either winning an 

 objectivity for physical and metaphysical judgment 

 at the cost of casting out from the moral judgment 

 the very principle of autonomy which Kant had tri- 

 umphantly shown to be its quickening essence, or 



