that he has not carried innovation to a pitch too audacious, and has made it sufficiently clear that his principles are either ancient principles which he has revived, or commonly current principles which he has worked out to their logical conclusions, and cleared of the inconsistencies which ordinarily deface them.
It is not upon the ground of novelty that the author would base his appeal for indulgence, but rather upon two wholly different facts.
To the more or less technical public of those who love philosophy for its own sake and study it irrespective of its results, as one of the finest and most salutary disciplines of the mind, he would appeal because he believes that the experience of the last sixty years must have generated in their minds an unavowed but deep-seated and widespread distrust of and disgust with the methods which have starved philosophy in the midst of plenty, and condemned it to sterility and decay in the very midst of the unparalleled progress of all the other branches of knowledge. Can they really believe that a science is on the right path, which in the opinion of its most authoritative exponents “has made no substantial advance since Hegel,” and which meets the advances of the other sciences by an attitude of querulous negation? Our philosophers have given more or less intelligible reasons, mostly in the form of voluminous commentaries on their predecessors, for their inability to accept a scientific interpretation of things which was so unduly neglectful of this or that technical distinction, laid down by Hegel, or Kant, or Thomas Aquinas, or Aristotle. But though they have abounded in endless criticisms of one another and of the scien-
