THE METHOD OF ABSTRACT METAPHYSIC. 1 55 



physical in its character. It promises much more, 

 but accomplishes much less. Indeed, we are con- 

 stantly tempted to assert that it has accomplished 

 nothing, and to say that science has never been 

 assisted, but often been perverted by metaphysics. 

 But such ebullitions of pardonable impatience would 

 ignore the immense impulse, the far-reaching sug- 

 gestions which the whole intellectual and emotional 

 life of men has often received from metaphysical 

 doctrines. But if the metaphysical method is more 

 suggestive, it is also less sound. It produces artificial 

 constructions which charm us by the harmonious 

 interdependence of their parts, but which are fatally 

 unstable. The demolition of a single part drags 

 the whole edifice to the ground, and in the common 

 ruin all its outworks perish. And so metaphysical 

 systems have seemed like a succession of beauteous 

 bubbles blown from the reflective pipe of genius, 

 which delighted us for a season and then were dis- 

 sipated into thin air. Where are the metaphysical 

 systems of the earlier Greeks or later Germans ? 

 Their multitudinous shades are buried in the bulky 

 tomes of our histories of philosophy, and but rarely 

 stalk about the earth in the eccentricities of living 

 representatives. The fatal flaw in almost all the 

 metaphysics of the past was their abstractness, and 

 this is a flaw which far exceeds their merits. For 

 what does it avail that the metaphysical method 

 rightly protests against the explanation of the 

 higher by the lower, if it confines itself to a mere 

 protest, to a mere assertion of their difference ? 



To tell us that the spiritual is not natural, that 

 soul is not body, that God is not man, that appear- 

 ance is not reality, is to tell us nothing. All this 

 does is to constitute a difference in kind between 



