Biographia Philosophica - A Retrospect

PREFACE, IT may appear to some that in the following pages the Biographic, is too prominent, to others that the Philosophic, is in excess, and perhaps a larger number may think that there is too much of both. When I remembered how the modesty of David Hume confined his narrative of the events of his own really memorable life within about a dozen pages, I was ready to agree with the first of these opinions, and to resolve that this Retrospect should remain unpublished. But I reflected that here the Biographia was introduced for the sake of Philosophia, so that it was not a story of personal incidents for their own sake. The narra tive is intended partly to infuse some familiar human interest into this account of a philosophical endeavour to deal with the riddle of the Uni verse and partly to show how racial, educational, and social influences, as well as changing phases of thought and national sentiment, in the last eighty years of the nineteenth century, have tended to direct the issue of that intellectual endeavour...