Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/13

x present account of the logical basis of the “descriptive” view of things is therefore a supplement to my former discussions. This present account contains, moreover, a good many elements which are to me, as I think that they will be to others, decidedly new, so that the resulting view of the theory of our finite knowledge is at any rate not the conventional one. The views here expressed, so far as they are new, have been, in my own mind, the outcome of an effort to study some of the recent literature of the Logic of Mathematics, — a region in which the Supplementary Essay of the former volume of these lectures sought for light. The second lecture of the present volume carries still further the train of thought of which that Supplementary Essay was a part. Whatever my success or failure, I am convinced that such study of the Logic of Mathematics is a region where the philosophical student of to-day ought to work. I call special attention here to the doctrine of the two forms of Serial Order, and to their respective relations to the “descriptive” and “appreciative” points of view.

The Theory of Time and Eternity which follows, in my third lecture, was briefly outlined in one passage of the former volume, but is here developed at length. It is of central importance for all the problems of the later lectures.

The cosmological discussions which follow, in the fourth and fifth lectures, constitute a deliberate effort to mediate between Idealism and our human experience of Nature. I have tried to show that an idealist is not obliged either to ignore or to make light of physical facts in order to maintain his theory of the Absolute. That the latter