Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/14

Rh theory is, in the only reasonable sense, itself an empirical doctrine, I have set forth in the former series of these lectures. Here I attempt to point out what links connect our general idealistic interpretation of all experience with our special interpretation of our experience of Nature. Hypotheses are, in such an undertaking, unavoidable. I pretend only to provisional views regarding all the details of the discussion. But that one has a right to such hypotheses, at the present stage of our knowledge, I have tried to make plain so far as my space has permitted.

In these first five lectures of the present series, I have come nearest to the ground which was covered by the much more thorough and closely reasoned lectures of my predecessor in the Gifford Lectureship at Aberdeen, Dr. James Ward. I had intended to find room in the text for some discussion of the volumes entitled Naturalism and Agnosticism, in which these lectures appeared. But discovering that I could not adequately deal with Dr. Ward’s volumes under the present conditions, I have preferred to leave until a future opportunity a treatment of the relations between his views and mine. Apart from such usually minor differences of opinion as exist between us, I feel that the two lines of argument are complementary to each other. Dr. Ward has approached the problem of our knowledge of Nature from the side of a criticism of special doctrines that have been held, and of special problems of science. I have made the topic one to which my previously stated general theory of Being is to be applied. At certain points, as I have been rejoiced to find, we have independently reached the