CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



§ I. The attempt nowadays to solve afresh the 

 world-old problems of philosophy will doubtless be 

 thought to require some apology : for though there 

 has never been an age in which the desire for such 

 solution has been more ardent, or the need greater, 

 there is none also in which the faith in its possibility 

 has been fainter. It is an age which professes to 

 have despaired of the ultimate problems of life with 

 its lips, whatever the secret hopes it may cherish in 

 its heart ; it is an age in which a theory of what we 

 can not know has usurped the name of philosophy, 

 in which science is defined as the knowledge of the 

 manifestations of the Unknowable, in which, even in 

 religion, God has become an unknowable Infinite, 

 and Faith has been degraded into an unthinking 

 assent to unmeaning verbiage about confessedly 

 insoluble difficulties, instead of being the prescience 

 that forecasts the future beyond what is rigorously 

 justified by the data as yet given, the pillar of flame 

 that points out the path of the soul beyond the 

 limits of unaided sight. And so we are brought 

 face to face with the curious and unnatural phen- 

 omenon that an age which has witnessed greater 

 triumphs of the human mind than any that preceded 

 it, should have despaired more completely of an 

 answer to its highest questions. 



