Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/51

 that will enable you to make assertions that hold good far beyond the limits of your experience. And part of the price is that you will in the end be unable to give a rational explanation of those very characteristics, which had been dismissed at the outset as irrelevant to a rational explanation. Thus the whole contradiction arises from a desperate attempt to eat one’s cake and yet have it, to secure the eternal possession of absolute truth and yet to profit by its development in time! Surely this is not a fitting occasion for invoking that supreme faculty of Faith, to which philosophy, perhaps as much as theology, must ultimately appeal?

If these considerations are valid, the idea of accounting for the time-process of the world on any system of abstract metaphysics is predestined to failure, and must be declared mistaken in principle. But there remain two questions of great importance: (1) Do such systems of abstract metaphysics lose all value? (2) Is there any other way of manipulating the time-process so as to fit it into a coherent systematic account of the world?

In answering the first question it mil be necessary to supplement the negative criticism of the claims of abstract metaphysics by tracing the consequences of their utter rejection. I have so far contended that no abstract metaphysic could say the last word about the world, on the ground that it was ex vi definitionis forced to reject some of the chief characteristics of that world. But if it cannot give us the whole truth, can it give us any truth? Is not the alternative to the rejection of the full claims of Hegelism (and kindred systems) a sceptical despair of the power of the reason to find a clue out of the labyrinth of experience?

Such a plea would not be devoid of a certain plausibility. Stress might be laid on the fact that the fundamental assumption of all abstract metaphysics is the fundamental assumption also of all science, that the whole imposing structure of the ‘laws of nature’ is formulated without reference to the temporal and spatial environment and the individual peculiarities of the things which ‘obey’ these laws, and so likewise lays claim to an eternal validity. How then can Metaphysic dare to reject an assumption on which the whole of Science rests? Again, it may be urged that from its very nature philosophy is an interpretation of experience in terms of thought, and must necessarily exhibit the intrinsic peculiarities of human thought. If abstraction, therefore, is characteristic of all our thinking, if all truth is abstract, it would seem that all philosophy must stand or fall with the abstract formulas in which alone our thought can take cognizance of reality, and may not dream of