INTRODUCTORY. 83 



human reason; the more confident these self-denying 

 assertions, the sooner will a reaction set in. The 

 question then for us is this : Has philosophical thought 

 merely exhausted its powers, or has it, at the very 

 moment when materialism, naturalism, and agnos- 

 ticism appear to rule supreme, still discovered some 

 untried path and some unrecognised resources ? Has 

 the ruling pessimism and indifferentism of the age given 

 way at all to any signs of hope that the veil will once 

 more be lifted and confidence restored ? Whoever has 

 read attentively the philosophy of the last ten years in 

 all the three countries cannot, I think, have failed to 

 discover signs of the recurrence of a more hopeful line 

 of thought. I shall have many opportunities of point- 

 ing to this in greater detail and with more definiteness 

 in the later chapters of the present section of this 

 History. 



For the moment it may be of interest to refer, as I have 

 done so often l^efore, to the changes which the philo- 

 sophical vocabulary of the three countries is undergoing, 

 to the increasing array of new terms with which philo- 

 sophical thought is being enriched, all pointing to the 

 advent of some new era of thought. Without defining 

 at present what is frequently only dimly foreshadowed 

 in this new vocabulary, I will refer only to the term 

 " Voluntarism " which Paulsen has coined and Professor ^e 

 Wundt has adopted to describe his ultimate philosophical ism." 

 position, to the philosophy of the " Idees-forces " of M. 

 Alfred Fouillee, and the " Philosophic de I'Effort " in 

 France, to the " Pragmatism " of the recent Oxford 

 school of Thought, and to William James's " Will to 



