VI PREFACE. 



that he has not carried Innovation to a pitch too 

 audacious, and has made it sufficiently clear that his 

 principles are either ancient principles which he has 

 revived, or commonly current principles which he 

 has worked out to their logical conclusions, and 

 cleared of the inconsistencies which ordinarily deface 

 them. 



It is not upon the ground of novelty that the 

 author would base his appeal for indulgence, but 

 rather upon two wholly different facts. 



To the more or less technical public of those 

 who love philosophy for its own sake and study it 

 irrespective of its results, as one of the finest and 

 most salutary disciplines of the mind, he would 

 appeal because he believes that the experience of 

 the last sixty years must have generated in their 

 minds an unavowed but deep-seated and wide- 

 spread distrust of and disgust with the methods 

 which have starved philosophy in the midst of 

 plenty, and condemned it to sterility and decay in 

 the very midst of the unparalleled progress of all 

 the other branches of knowledge. Can they really 

 believe that a science is on the right path, which 

 in the opinion of its most authoritative exponents 

 ** has made no substantial advance since Hegel," 

 and which meets the advances of the other sciences 

 by an attitude of querulous negation ? Our philo- 

 sophers have given more or less intelligible reasons, 

 mostly in the form of voluminous commentaries on 

 their predecessors, for their inability to accept a 

 scientific interpretation of things which was so un- 

 duly neglectful of this or that technical distinction, 

 laid down by Hegel, or Kant, or Thomas Aquinas, 

 or Aristotle. But though they have abounded in 

 endless criticisms of one another and of the scien- 



