172 W. L. COURTNEY, M.A., LL.D., ON 
have tacitly agreed to drop out of consideration principles 
and laws which do not concern the ordinary relation of phe- 
nomena to one another. 
One of my assumptions I do not think that it is necessary 
to justify ; it is that which deals with the salient character- 
istic of modern thought, that it shrinks from arriving at 
definite, a positive, a dogmatic conclusion, with regard to those 
principles which, in an older age, we used to call the ultimate 
verities of the world. P ossibly, however, it may be necessary 
to say in what sense the system of Kant represents a turning 
point in speculation. In order to elucidate this point, I will 
ask you to consider that the course of modern philosophy has 
in one respect run parallel with the course which was taken 
by the earlier philosophy of Greece. You will find, I think, 
that of the two main questions which human beings ask of 
themselves, “ What am I?” and “ What is the world in which 
I live?” the second takes precedence of the first, and that, 
after a certain period of more or less hypothetical speculation, 
the discovery is made that the second cannot be answered at 
all, unless we have come to some conclusion about the first. 
Observe, for instance, what happened in the infancy of specu- 
lation in Greece, There were a series of physical philoso- 
phers who desired to arrive at definite statements with regard 
to the constitution of the world in which they found them- 
selves. Is there one primitive principle, is there one under- 
lying element, which can explain the kosmos of things ? 
One auswer is, water; another is air; a thirdis fire; afourth 
is all the four elements taken together. And then, when 
philosophy has succeeded in producing a multiplicity of incon- 
sistent and contradictory answers, there comes a man lke 
Socrates, who bluntly declares that all his predecessors had 
begun at the wrong end in the attempted solution of their 
problems. ‘There is no chance of discovering the nature and 
constitution of the world, unless certain preliminary questions 
are answered :— What am I, who pretend to understand the 
world? How can I be sure that I can know anything? How 
can I be certain that my so-called processes of knowledge can 
be trusted? What, in point of fact, am I, who desire the 
solution of such terrestrial and celestial problems? And then 
philosophy makes a pause, because a new point of view is 
put before it, and for a long time its special subject is the 
enquiry into the conditions of knowledge, and the chief study 
of the thinker becomes, not physics, but logic, ethics, and 
psychology. 
