xviii INTRODUCTION 



foundations of experience, the principle of working piece- 

 meal and admitting the broken and incomplete character of 

 knowledge was and is for me sounder than the method of 

 constructing a complete and rounded system at a stroke by 

 some brilliant, perhaps too brilliant, piece of analysis. 

 Metaphysical analysis clearly had its function in setting out 

 and co-ordinating the underlying ideas of science and of 

 experience generally. But I could never accept the view 

 that the whole work of science was of secondary importance, 

 that it could go on constructing its world as it chose, but 

 that whatever its results, a metaphysical analysis would 

 always be able to reinterpret the entire scientific scheme on 

 its own lines. Doubtless metaphysical analysis and scien- 

 tific specialism has each its sphere, but they cannot maintain 

 an attitude of mutual indifference to the end. Neither is 

 all-embracing, and a true philosophy, a really concrete inter- 

 pretation of our experience as a whole, must aim rather at a 

 synthesis in which the analysis of first principles figures as 

 the keystone of the arch of science. In this respect Mr. 

 Spencer, whatever the defects of hi ; s method, seemed to me 

 to have been justly inspired. But for a long time I did not 

 imagine the function of philosophical criticism to be any- 

 thing but critical and negative. It was not till much later 

 that I came to think that it might yield certain sound 

 generalisations as to the nature of reality, and I confess I 

 should not even now attach more than a speculative im- 

 portance to such generalisations if they were not corro- 

 borated by a synthetic view of experience. 



In the meanwhile I was convinced that a philosophy that 

 was to possess more than a speculative interest must rest on 

 a synthesis of experience as interpreted by science, and that 

 to such a synthesis the general conception of evolution 

 offered a key. The immediate question was whether it was 

 possible to overcome the contradictions of that theory as 



