practical man and his better-informed scientific neighbour ply their useful business. There are floating in the world of thought far too much flash currency, far too many worthless securities, driving by a new 'Gresham's law' sound money from the market.
From time to time an uneasy sense of insecurity visits the usually absorbed and busy traffickers: they are threatened with a necessity to 'realize', and they turn reproachfully to the despised philosopher with requests to restore their shaken confidence and to correct their currency—their tesserae notionum. They find their working coinage so defaced or degraded that they fear that for all their well-filled coffers they may on examination prove bankrupt, their fancied wealth turned in a moment, like the fairies' gifts, to withered leaves. They dread lest their working distinctions and unifications prove to be without fixity and security of basis.
De nobis fabula narratur. We are all in the same case. Even the philosopher cannot convert all his possessions into pure gold. Even if he could he might, like Mark Twain's hero with the million pound banknote in his pocket, starve in the midst of plenty. He must, like others, for the larger part of his thought and practice, rely on common sense and such aid as the sciences afford. Philosophy is not a substitute for either. After all, it pretends to do no more than to explicate and articulate the main structural principles of experience.
This is all it professes and hopes to do even in regard to 'its own house'—the world of Mind or Spirit. This is its first business: with this business we are here to attempt a beginning. The domestic distinction we are here to consider and criticize is that between Metaphysical or Moral Philosophy. The common basis is patent, for
