Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/43

Rh It would be interesting to follow the working of Butler's mind in detail: but enough has, surely, now been said to suggest how near and intimate is the mind of the man to our own intellectual situation.

For with us, too, as for him, the metaphysical stop is off. Metaphysics are in suspense. The five or six experts who still hand on the good tradition can be heard crying in the night to one another. But no one listens; and they alone understand each other, and carry on faithfully, in a tiny knot, the historic debate on the Existence of the Absolute. Let them hold on to their high faith. Some day their cause will re-emerge. It cannot be that man will ever surrender the heritage won by the heroic endeavour that opened with Plato and closed with Hegel.

But the Vision is not yet. And, in the meantime, we are all anxiously engaged in a debate on the lower plane. We are scientific. We are psychological. We are empirical. We are pragmatic. We are employed, eagerly, in seeing how much can be done without touching on the problems of the higher Logic. We accept the inherent paradoxes of the ultimate Reason. We do not propose to go behind its primary assumptions. We are satisfied with 'transcendental emotion', which allows for no problem, since it has, by its own inherent validity, solved it before it can begin. Or we are content with any formula which can verify its practical efficiency in adapting the facts of life to our dominant interest. Our entire thought is concentrated on Experience. It is the shaping, and the handling, and the assortment of the facts of human Experience with which we are concerned. Even Philosophy has withdrawn from its high a priori methods, and recognizes how intimately its task is set within the challenging limitations of common everyday experience. 'Experience is the beginning and the end of Philosophy,' says a recent philosophic writer. 'Philosophy takes its rise in experience. It is itself a feature in experience. Experience asks the question which philosophy has to answer. In