Page:Adventures of Ideas.djvu/12



title of this book, Adventures of Ideas, bears two meanings, both applicable to the subject-matter. One meaning is the effect of certain ideas in promoting the slow drift of mankind towards civilization. This is the Adventure of Ideas in the history of mankind. The other meaning is the author’s adventure in framing a speculative scheme of ideas which shall be explanatory of the historical adventure.

The book is in fact a study of the concept of civilization, and an endeavour to understand how it is that civilized beings arise. One point, emphasized throughout, is the im- portance of Adventure for the promotion and preservation of civilization.

The three books — Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas — are an endeavour to express a way of understanding the nature of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is illustrated by a survey of the mutations of human experience. Each book can be read separately; but they supplement each other’s omissions or compressions.

The books that have chiefly influenced my general way of looking at this historical topic are Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Paul Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, Henry Osborn Taylor’s The Mediæval Mind, Leslie Stephen’s English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and various well-known collections of letters. While on the subject of literature, I venture to commend to the notice of those interested in an earlier development of English Thought, and also in good