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which, has life and living beings for its sphere of inquiry. 
This science we delight in, most of all the sciences of nature, 
for the reason that the scientific study of life is the best pre- 
paration for and the best introduction to the study of the soul, 
inasmuch as it effectually disciplines man to do justice to 
psychical phenomena and all the beliefs and relations which 
they involve, by first confronting him with the mysteries of 
life, and then introducing him to those higher phenomena of 
conscious experience and activity from which these are yet 
sharply distinguished. 
We would not be suspected for a moment, by the use of 
this phrase, of throwing any discredit upon metaphysics 
proper ; which term and the science which it designates both 
need all the good words which can be said of them in the evil 
days of criticism and disesteem on which they have fallen in 
many so-called scientific circles. 
We believe in metaphysics or philosophy, both in the narrow 
and the enlarged conceptions of the same, whether the words 
signify the conceptions and principles which must be assumed 
as the foundations of every special science, or whether they 
stand for a still more extensive sphere of truths concerning 
man, nature, space, time, and God, which are partly necessary 
and partly inductive. We would not therefore be understood 
as calling in question metaphysics as such, or of availing 
ourselves of any general disesteem in which the term 
is often used to the damage of that form of speculation 
which we have in mind, and which we call metaphysics by 
eminence. 
Our theme is physiological metaphysics. We call this 
science metaphysics because it proposes a system of ultimate 
formulas for the explanation of the origin and history of the 
universe, which it uses as the clue to our scientific knowledge 
of the same. We call it physiological, because the special 
science of physiology has furnished its distinctive conceptions 
and principles, and fixed its terminology. Its representatives 
and defenders have stigmatized much of the current meta- 
physics as theological, on the assumption that in some sense it 
had illegitimately borrowed its principles and methods from 
positive or Christian theology. With much greater propriety 
we may use the phrase physiological metaphysics of a system 
in which physiological relations are made supreme, and for 
which to a large extent they have furnished the terminology. 
We do not object to the recognition of physiological concep- 
tions in the domain of metaphysics. Every science, so far as 
its subject-matter is unique and furnishes conceptions and 
relations that are peculiar to itself, must have what we may 
