Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 11.pdf/213

 done with the general preposterousness of a huge modern community treating philosophy as a remote special subject reserved for a small minority of university students, he will find still more matter for amazement and laughter in our way of teaching philosophy. We do not bring the young mind up against the few broad elemental questions that are the questions of metaphysics, the questions that provide the basis of all clear thinking. We do not make it discuss, correct it, elucidate it. That was the way of the Greeks, and we worship that divine people far too much to adopt their way. No, we lecture to our young people about not philosophy but philosophers, we put them through book after book, telling how other people have discussed these questions. We avoid the questions of metaphysics, but we deliver semi-digested half views of the discussions of, and answers to these questions made by men of all sorts and qualities, in various remote languages and under conditions quite different from our own. In their histories the essential questions are presently completely lost sight of. We give them compact (and indeed highly desiccated) accounts of the philosophy of Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Locke, Descartes and so on and so on. It is as if we began teaching arithmetic by long lectures upon the origin of the Roman numerals and then went on to the lives and motives of the Arab mathematicians in Spain, or started with Roger Bacon in chemistry or Sir Richard Owen in comparative anatomy. A little while ago I had a most edifying conversation with two young women who had been "doing" and who had "done," bless them! "philosophy" in the Universities of London and