provide a common school of debate which rivals schools of the ancient and medieval worlds. Accordingly I have heavy obligations to acknowledge to Bertrand Russell, Wildon Carr, F. C. Schiller, T. P. Nunn, Dawes Hicks, McTaggart, James Ward, and many others who, amid their divergencies of opinion, are united in the candid zeal of their quest for truth.
It is quite unnecessary to draw attention to the incompleteness of this investigation. The book is merely an enquiry. It raises more difficulties than those which it professes to settle. This is inevitable in any philosophical work, however complete. All that one can hope to do is to settle the right sort of difficulties and to raise the right sort of ulterior questions, and thus to accomplish one short step further into the unfathomable mystery.
Memories are short, and perhaps it is not inapt to put on record circumstances common to the life of all England during years of war. The book is the product of intervals of leisure amid pressing occupation, a refuge from immediate fact. It has been thought out and written amid the sound of guns — guns of Kitchener’s army training on Salisbury Plain, guns on the Somme faintly echoing across the Sussex coast: some few parts composed to pass times of expectation during air-raids over London, punctuated by the sound of bombs and the answer of artillery, with argument clipped by the whirr of aeroplanes. And through the land anxiety, and at last the anguish which is the price of victory.
April 20, 1919
