Page:Riddles of the Sphinx (1891).djvu/8

 for lack of the most ordinary facilities for studying the subject. It is with a view to affording these, and in the hope that his book may be found not only a contribution to modern philosophy, but useful also as an introduction to its study, that the author has avoided needless technicalities, and as far as possible explained their use on their first appearance. And to some extent the same motive has led him to treat his subject in the order which it assumes to the individual mind as it sets out on its explorations. 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. And at the same time this arrangement brings out more clearly the natural dialectic of the soul, and the necessity of the process which impels it, step by step, from the coarsest prejudice and crassest “fact,” towards the loftiest ideals of metaphysics. But an adequate defence of the plan of the book may be made also on its intrinsic merits. It is written not only in the order which is likely to be most palatable to the ordinary reader, but also in the order which is natural both to human thought and to the course of the world, which is required by its inductive method of philosophizing (ch. vi. § 2), the order in which it took shape in the author’s brain, and the order which is most worthy of the dignity of the subject. For by representing the course of the argument as a sort of philosophical Pilgrim’s Progress, it most emphatically asserts the vital importance of the points at issue.

And yet, of course, the author is well aware that his order is not devoid of countervailing