Fifty or sixty years ago anyone fluttering the pages of one of the many magazines which then catered for the cultivated and intelligent English reader would have been fairly certain to come upon an article bearing somewhat the same title as that of the present paper. The author would probably be an eminent scientist, such as Huxley or Clifford; a distinguished scholar, such as Frederic Harrison or Edmund Gurney; or a politician of cabinet rank, such as Gladstone or Morley. Whichever side he might take, he would write with the moral fervour of which Englishmen at that time had an inexhaustible supply. Nowadays the so-called “conflict between Religion and Science,” which was then appetizingly hot from the oven, has acquired something of the repulsiveness of half-cold mutton in halfcongealed gravy. There seems to be a widespread opinion that Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, with some highly technical and not readily intelligible assistance from Professor Whitehead, have enabled the lion to lie down with the lamb. Well, I have no wish to pipe a discordant note in this scene of Messianic harmony. But I cannot help reflecting that psychology, anthropology, and psychical research have made considerable advances as well as mathematical physics; and that they seem prima facie much more likely to be relevant to religion. Even the ordinary common sense of the lawyer and the historian may still have something useful to say on such topics.

The subject on which I am to address you this evening is one which, though it is of fundamental importance both for philosophy and for practice, cannot but present the gravest difficulties for such treatment as falls within the limits of this occasion. Philosophical problems are always difficult, but those of ultimate metaphysics are in this respect egregious. For the simplifications that are open to the scientific phenomenologist who can rest content with a spatiotemporal world, or to the analyst who concentrates on the objective content with which the human understanding most conspicuously concerns itself, are not open to the metaphysician. He must meet the full complexity of things: not limiting himself to their appearances as objects within human experience, nor to a reflective analysis of their objective content, but taking them as they must be in themselves in order that they may appear as they empirically and reflectively do appear for the special cognitive faculties of man. I ask, therefore, for your patience and attention as I try first of all to lead you into, and then, as I hope, out of, the metaphysical labyrinth. For what I have to describe is something of a metaphysical adventure, or, if you like, a metaphysical ghoststory, in which the ghosts assume such reality as to make the solid things “give up the ghost”—which is just as it should be in a good ghost-story!

Those, like the present writer, for whom the late Samuel Alexander unlocked doors to new realms of wisdom and delight, or who basked in the sunshine of encouragement and kindly advice he gave so readily to younger men, will understand with what alacrity this opportunity was seized of paying a small tribute to the memory of so unusual and attractive a personality. To resurrect the mind that has built of its own fabric a mansion so vast that its chambers have room for every fact of experience and every theory of science will always provide a happy and appropriate memorial to one whose main business in life was the disinterested speculation idolized by the Greeks as the worthiest employment to which the human spirit can devote its powers. My own share in this labour of love is small and limited in scope; I want to fill in one corner of the picture of Alexander's philosophical system, drawn by Professor Muirhead in the last number of Philosophy, by describing in some detail what he thought about Art and Beauty in their most important aspects and relations.

In studying the problems of philosophy, it is commonly considered an advantage to approach them through the history of philosophy, But to be compelled to spread one's sails, and take one's solitary course, “as if no Plato or Kant had ever existed,” has perhaps its advantages too.