NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

The principles and precepts therein involved are running hourly through our processes of reasoning, our persuasion, our judicial action, our social opinions. Indeed, no single science, unless, perhaps, we except mathematics, is furnishing so many, so constant, so undoubted guides, both to those who maintain, and to those who deny, its theoretical value, as philosophy, with its adjuncts of logic, aesthetics and ethics. Totally untrue, then, is the representation that metaphysics is a hopeless medley of contradictory and unverified theories. An appearance of truth is given to this assertion by directing attention from established facts to those skirting and partially explored fields of ontological inquiry, of the sources of our mental furniture, and of the authority of our faculties. We might thus discredit the established facts of electricity on the ground of conflicting opinions concerning the nature of the activities or physical states which constitute it.

Now, it is evident, from the nature of the case, that more of these ultimate questions, more of these points at which direct, sensible knowledge ends, must belong to philosophy than to any other branch. The postulates and definitions of knowledge are conditioned on the faculties of mind, and to state these in their safe, ultimate form; to settle where knowing, in all its phases, begins, and to give the reasons and grounds of these statements, is a late and difficult task, and one which should not, by its laborious and partial results, prejudice a department which is highest in rank, as it is most recondite and ultimate in its conclusions.

What act more indolent and unscientific than to jump to the conclusion, that these deepest questions are unsearchable and fruitless than to turn our back on a region that does not at once yield its secrets? Nor are we without progress in these most obscure directions of philosophical inquiry. In some cases, the true conditions of the problem are better