Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/8



discussions upon which the present volume is based formed the second and concluding series of my Gifford Lectures on “The World and the Individual.” They were delivered before the University of Aberdeen in January, 1900. The delay in publishing them is largely due to the revision to which I have subjected the original manuscript. This revision amounts, in a portion of the lectures, to a rewriting, and has also come to include statements and arguments that I had not previously put into shape at all. These additions have caused me, in some cases, more trouble than I had anticipated, and more, as I hope, than the text will directly make manifest to the reader.

The general need for such changes did not spring, I am sure, from any lack of effort on my part to adapt the lectures, actually read at Aberdeen, to their announced purpose. The variety and the complexity of the topics of the present volume require the printed book to contain much that could not have been adequately stated in any oral discussion; while these same characters of my subject-matter led, at some points, to a diffuseness in the original lectures which I found it possible to abbreviate in preparing the volume for publication. In the public lecture-room the hearer has no time to meditate, and the speaker too little opportunity to be either concise or