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 2 D. G. RITCHIE : Even those who are themselves busied with philosophical studies at times feel a certain doubt about their own posi- tion. The uncomfortable suspicion suggests itself that the great amount of writing and discussion actually going on upon philosophical subjects may perhaps after all be no real proof of the vitality of metaphysics ; for a very large and, as some may think, the most interesting and most valuable part of it is concerned with the careful exposition and criti- cism of the great philosophers. Philosophy, especially in Germany, long the chosen home of metaphysics, appears to have become very largely the study of its own history. The age of creation seems at an end, and our days have fallen in an " Alexandrian " period of commentators and critics. The biography of metaphysics is being so minutely written that we begin to fear that metaphysics itself must be dead, and that what we are studying and elaborating so anxiously is but a long and not altogether favourable obituary notice. With such objections and doubts I propose to deal at present by asking two questions : (1 ) May not the nature of philosophy itself render inevitable this perpetual recur- rence to the thought of the past ? and (2) may there not be special reasons in our own age why this historical interest should be predominant ? These questions are not new, and I do not profess to have anything very new to say upon them ; but they seem to me to be worth discussing afresh in a philosophical society which devotes no small part of its time to the study of past philosophy, and which by its very name professes a permanent debt to him whom several centuries called " the philosopher ". I do not think it accurate to describe the progress of the special sciences as consisting in a continuous accumulation of facts. An accumulation of facts is never science, but only the materials for science. Progress in the sciences consists in the substitution of more adequate concepts or categories for those by which we have hitherto attempted to unify and make intelligible to ourselves some parts or aspects of our experience. New facts are, indeed, the occasion for framing new concepts, and new concepts aid in the discovery of new facts ; but the accumulation of facts is not what is essential in scientific progress. To take a simple illustration, the fact that the sun is seen on one side of the sky in the morning and on the other side in the evening can be explained by the movement of the sun over the earth the theory which we all use in our " common-sense " thinking and when we speak of " sunrise " and " sunset ". The fact has been ex- plained more adequately by the revolution of the earth on