Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/260

Rh well our doubt, we must first provisionally accept this notion of popular metaphysics itself. We must waive for the moment our difficulty, that it may recur to us with greater importance by and by. Let the reader once come to see that this popular notion of an external world is an utterly vague conception, capable of numberless forms, and religiously unsatisfactory in all of them, and then we shall expect him to feel the force of the deeper philosophic problems involved. This present chapter will therefore proceed directly to an examination of the popular notions about the external world. We shall examine them, namely, to find whether they offer any religious aspect. We shall find that they do not offer any such aspect in any satisfactory sense. That the good is supreme in the external world as popularly conceived, nobody can establish. This supposed external world is once for all a World of Doubt, and in it there is no abiding place. When the reader has come to feel with us this truth, then he will be ready to look deeper into the matter. Then some other more genuinely philosophic conception of Reality will have its place. Hence in the rest of this chapter we shall be accepting provisionally notions that we are hereafter to reject, and assuming much on trust that is at best very doubtful. We shall show that, even so aided, the popular notions about the religious aspect of this world cannot bear criticism. This visible world of popular faith will lose its worth for us. We shall have to look elsewhere.

The religious significance once removed from the