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to complete the doctrine of the rest. And the old material also has been thoroughly revised and considerably augmented. So that I am not without hopes that the collection, though discontinuous in form, will be found to be coherent in substance, and to present successive aspects of a fairly systematic body of doctrine. To me at least it has seemed that, when thus taken collectively, these essays not only reinforced my previous contentions, but even supplied the ground for a further advance of the greatest importance.

It is clear to all who have kept in touch with the pulse of thought that we are on the brink of great events in those intellectual altitudes which a time-honoured satire has described as the intelligible world. The ancient shibboleths encounter open yawns and unconcealed derision. The rattling of dry bones no longer fascinates respect nor plunges a self-suggested horde of fakirs in hypnotic stupor. The agnostic maunderings of impotent despair are flung aside with a contemptuous smile by the young, the strong, the virile. And there is growing up a reasonable faith that even the highest peaks of speculation may prove accessible to properly-equipped explorers, while what seemed so unapproachable was nothing but a cloud-land of confused imaginings. Among the more marked symptoms that the times are growing more propitious to new philosophic enterprise, I would instance the conspicuous success of Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief; the magnificent series of William James's popular works, The Will to Believe, Human Immortality, and The Varieties of Religious Experience; James Ward's important Gifford Lectures on Naturalism and Agnosticism; the emergence from Oxford, where the idealist enthusiasm of thirty years ago long seemed to have fossilised into sterile logic-chopping or to have dissolved into Bradleian scepticism, of so audacious a manifesto as Personal Idealism; and most recently, but not