PREFACE TO THE FIRST PART (1895)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2010
Summary
These Essays and Notices, with the exception of the first of the series, which was published separately in 1893, are all reprinted from the pages of periodicals. There has been a little re-writing, but on the whole the amount of alteration is not great. For permission to republish the articles and reviews I have to thank Messrs. Macmillan and Co. and the editors and proprietors of Mind and of The Monist. I must also specially thank M. Renouvier for the permission, at once accorded, to reproduce his own as well as my share of a correspondence which appeared in the Critique Philosophique in 1887.
The common motive of both essays and reviews, as it seems to me, is an effort to arrive at something positive through criticism. Of the success with which this has been attempted I leave the reader to judge. There is only one part of the book on which I propose to say anything more by way of preface—namely, the part which is distinctively metaphysical. So far as this is concerned, I freely admit that I have not attained any result capable of being summed up in a completed formula. Even here, however, it seems to me that something can be said with certainty, and something with a high degree of intellectual assurance.
First, as to the certainty attainable in metaphysics. The only absolute certainty seems to me to be, not in anything that can be called Ontology, but only in what is called Theory of Knowledge.
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- Information
- The Metaphysics of Evolution , pp. 3 - 5Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009First published in: 1928