by F. C. S. Schiller

“ For romance is a relative term, and for his part he would often be inclined to agree with the uninitiated public in looking upon some of the most ordinary assertions of the dullest every-day philosophy as the wildest and most pernicious romance. And in any case, no apology should be needed for the romance of philosophy in an age which has rightly learned to appreciate “the fairy tales of science.” If truth seems stranger than fiction, it is because we have previously abased our minds to the level of superstitions none the less fictitious for being unpoetical. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the splendid satire of Plato is unfortunately still too true to the spirit of men’s treatment of those whose souls have risen by rough paths of speculation to the supernal spheres of metaphysics, and who return to tell them that the shadows on the walls of their Cave are not the whole truth, nor precisely what their nurses have taught them, and such as they have learnt from their grandmothers. ”

“ But though the shock of diametrically opposed views is generating in many thoughtful minds, the conviction that their common ground and reconciliation must be sought deeper down than has been the fashion, the anti-metaphysical surface current is still sufficiently violent, both in religion and in science, to render discretion the duty of all who do not covet the barren honours of a useless martyrdom. ”

“ Instead of hastily condemning verbal divergencies from the wording of the Athanasian Creed, let them reflect rather whether it is not wiser to meet in a conciliatory spirit the well-meant efforts of a philosophical theory which may sincerely claim that its metaphysics enable it to grant to religion the substance, though not the shadow of its demands, and which challenges careful consideration of the question whether all the alternative systems do not do just the reverse, and sacrifice the substance to the shadow. ”

“ Certainly religion can still less afford to quarrel needlessly with philosophy than science; but even the votaries of the physical sciences may find it growing more and more impossible to disavow their metaphysical basis, and more and more needful to recognize that the problems of philosophy concern the first principles of all knowing and all living. ”

“ He believes that quite apart from professed philosophers, there exists a large and growing body of men, who are interested to know “what it all comes to,” who are impressed by the mystery of the claim made on behalf of philosophy, and yet repelled by the fragmentariness, the unattractive form and the inconclusiveness of modern philosophy. ”

“ By setting out from the anti-metaphysical agnosticism of ordinary men, it starts with a stock of ideas which are more familiar to men than the fundamental conceptions of metaphysics, which come last in the order of discovery. ”

“ But though they have abounded in endless criticisms of one another and of the scientists, they have not found it possible to inform us what interpretation they themselves would put upon the world in the light of modern discoveries. Where is the cultivated reader to go for a positive statement of the philosophic view of the world, for an exposition of modern metaphysics, and for an explanation of their bearing on the problem of life in its modern shape? ”

“ So far, then, from priding himself upon his novelty, the author would rather hope 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. ”

“ He trusts, therefore, that rather than impugn the orthodoxy of a philosophy which contains no doctrine inconsistent with the principles of religion, theologians will find it possible to put such an interpretation upon the dogmas in question as will at length reconcile faith with reason. ”

“ Hence it would be needless to assign any further reason for the last point it is necessary to allude to, viz., the anonymity of the Riddles of the Sphinx, even if the professional position of its author were such that he could afford to disregard men’s intolerance of real or seeming innovation. ”

“ It makes him liable, e.g., to verbal contradictions between the earlier and more imperfect adumbrations of a conception, and the clearer and more perfect grasp which is possible only later on, i.e., it renders it necessary to read the earlier to some extent in the light of the later assertions. ”