590th OEDINARY GENERAL MEETING. 



HELD IN COMMITTEE ROOM B, THE CENTRAL HALL, 

 WESTMINSTER, ON MONDAY, MAY 7th, 1917, 



AT 4.30 P.M. 



The Rev. H. J. R. Marston, M.A., took the Chair. 



The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and confirmed. 



The Secretary announced the election of Arthur K. Grimsdale, Esq., 

 as an Associate of the Institute. 



The Chairman said : It now becomes my duty, and is ray pleasure, to 

 invite a very dear friend and distinguished thinker to read a paper 

 entitled "The Pre-Requisites of a Christian Philosophy." Dr. Whately 

 is a real and accepted master of this very difficult and rather abstruse 

 subject, and everything that he says deserves, and I have no doubt will 

 receive, the most careful attention. 



THE PRE-REQ UISITES OF A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPH F. 

 By the Rev. A. R. Whately, M.A., D.D. 



A FEW years ago I had the privilege of reading a paper 

 before the Victoria Institute on "The Demand for a 

 Christian Philosophy." This present paper is, as 

 requested, a sort of sequel to it, and I hope to suggest briefly 

 what seems to me the orientation of mind required from the 

 Christian Philosopher if he is to do real justice to his subject- 

 matter. As it will be necessary to deal chiefly with the ideas 

 that point to the importance and possibility of such philosophy, 

 and to indicate how it should proceed, it might perhaps have 

 been as well if the title of this paper had contained the word 

 Pre-suppositions " instead of " Pre-requisites." But the latter 

 word, on the other hand, includes the whole equipment neces- 

 sary, and this is not merely intellectual. 



The justification of a Christian Philosophy and the exposition of 

 its fundamental axioms are aspects of the same task. Let us begin, 

 therefore, by answering the question, " What is Philosophy? ' 

 That answer should justify Philosophy in the best and only true 

 way — by showing what it really is. And, at the same time, we 

 are inevitably led to discuss its connection with Religion. 



Philosophy, in the restricted sense in which the term is now 

 applied, is nothing else than Thought carried as far as it will go 

 — Thought seeking for its own basis and its own limits. Those 

 who object to it as merely cloudy speculation that tries to 



