Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/150

 140 assigned the status of creature merely, read Hobbes. And what shall be said of the chance of man's surviving the dissolution of his body, and entering upon another life in which he is not affected by the play of natural forces? The immortality of man is most elaborately and eloquently argued in Plato's "Phaedo," and again in Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason." But the crucial question in this whole range of problems is the question, not of man, but of God. What, in the last analysis, controls the affairs of this world? Is it a blind, mechanical force, or is it a moral force, which guarantees the triumph of the good, and the salvation of him who performs his duty? This is the most far-reaching and momentous question that can be asked, and it takes us over to that branch of philosophy that has acquired the name of "Metaphysics."

METAPHYSICS The term "Metaphysics" has acquired a colloquial meaning that will mislead us unless we are on our guard. It is commonly used to mean such theories as have to do with the mysterious or occult. There is a certain justification for this usage, in that metaphysics is speculative rather than strictly experimental, and in that it takes us beyond the first appearances of things. But this is a question of method, and not of doctrine. To be a metaphysician one must push one's thinking to the uttermost boundaries, and one must not rest satisfied with any first appearances, or any common-sense or conventional conclusions. But there is no unnecessary connection whatever between metaphysics and the doctrine that reality is mysterious or transcendent or supernatural or anything of the kind. It is entirely possible that metaphysics should in the end conclude that things are precisely what they seem, or that nature and nature alone is real. Metaphysics is simply an attempt to get to the bottom of things, and ascertain if possible what is the fundamental constitution of reality, and what its first and last causes. There are two leading alternatives: the theory that justifies the belief in God; the theory that discredits it, reducing it to a work of the imagination, an act of sheer faith, of an ecclesiastical fiction. The classic example of the latter type of metaphysics, ordinarily known as Materialism,