INTRODUCTION xvii 



selection were already apparent before Weismann's work 

 acquired its ascendency, and were so far accepted by Mr. 

 Spencer as to be made the basis of an uncompromising 

 economic individualism. This assertion of individualism 

 coincided with the beginnings of a new demand for the 

 extension of collective responsibility and the social control 

 of industrial life. Economically the old individualism was 

 dying, and apart from the evolutionist school, it was clear 

 to thinking men that the idea of liberty required a new 

 definition. Such a definition was propounded by T. H. 

 Green, whose influence, together with that of the late 

 Master of Balliol, was dominant in Oxford and in the 

 English and Scottish Universities generally in the Eighties 

 and early Nineties. In this philosophy there seemed to 

 many to be a way of escape not only from a barren indi- 

 vidualism but from the whole philosophy of evolutionism. 

 An adaptation of German metaphysics, a modified Hegel- 

 ianism, or a form of Kantianism in which what was best in 

 the Hegelian criticism was incorporated, might maintain 

 itself against science and justify a spiritual conception of / 

 human life and of the entire world order. This method 

 however, to speak frankly and quite personally, I could 

 never accept. Apart from all difficulties of detail, two things 

 always seemed clear to me. One was that the attempt to 

 regard reality as all spiritual was as fatal to clear thinking 

 and to the most cherished ideas of the Idealist himself as 

 Materialism. When everything is spiritual the spiritual 

 loses all distinctive significance, and none of the shifts by 

 which Idealism explains error and evil have ever seemed 

 to me to turn or even to approach the central difficulty. 

 My second conviction was that the philosophy of the future * ' 

 must make its account with science. Whatever the limita- 

 tions of scientific method and the faults and even the blind- 

 ness of scientific specialism, the plan of building from the 



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