EPITAPH ON THE CURATE.

The curate is dead,-there's no more to be said,

His fine eyes! ah! they'll want no more blackening,
For the doctor who killed him, and reigns in his stead,
Says "he dee'd o' a process o' Wakening.”

I confess I was thunderstruck.

me down with a feather.

You might have knocked

IT

METAPHYSICS.

II. THE EFFORTS OF THE EARLY GREEKS.

T is a curious fact that there should be any necessity in an age when intellectual activity is so catholic and so widespread to justify the study of philosophy. Yet it is very clear that the world, even its more intelligent portion, views with increasing suspicion, if not with contempt, discussions which have stirred the enthusiasm of the greatest thinkers from the earliest times to our own. Cui bono is an especially favoured answer to all those students who are not absolutely divorced from this abstract study. What can be the use, we are asked by men with great vertebræ and heavy limbs, in tracking out the halting logic and faulty inferences that pervade the dreams of fantastic dreamers far away from the practical life that is of immediate interest to us all, a mere sail through cloud-land, profitless and aimless? Is it so? Granting to the full the eventual hopelessness of the problem, is it quite aimless and profitless to map out the grounds upon which human opinion ultimately rests, and to survey the boundaries within which the human mind must work? Is it not, in fact, an absolute duty incumbent upon all men who profess to care for culture to spend some time

either directly or vicariously in considering those profound problems which have exercised the skill and ingenuity of the greatest minds of all time? How can men be said to have opinions at all until they have analyzed and sifted the grounds and bases of those opinions-bases underlying not one branch of human thought only, but every branch? Profoundly important to the moralist and the theologian no less than to the scientific explorer and the student of literature. Is it not cloquent of the necessity of these speculations that the greatest thinkers of all ages have made them the supreme goal of their efforts? What names are more weighty in our own day as original and fertile explorers than Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Clifford, Mill, and Grote, to limit ourselves to a very few among our own people? Can it be an altogether futile quest that has caused all these, and many more like them, to converge their most subtle analysis upon these fundamental problems? Nay more, cannot we with the greatest confidence affirm that it is upon the views taken of these very problems that the whole scheme of each of these thinkers is based? That contending factions and schools in politics, morals, religion, and even physics, are divided, not so much in regard to modes of inquiry as in regard to the fundamental data of their various schemes, the fundamental data which forms the subject matter of metaphysical inquiry. It may be that metaphysics presents us with an insoluble problem, or rather deludes us with a false issue, yet it is no less true that until we have plumbed the secret depths of the human mind, and the possibilities of human thought, we cannot be sure that we are caged in a cul de sac to which there is no outlet, and standing upon a quaking bog to which there is no solid foundation. We must remember that the goal of metaphysics, namely, to bring eternal truth within the reach of human faculties, is at least a noble aim, and it is an inspiring thought that

no amount of failure has ever long satisfied men that in searching after this utopian end they are necessarily baffled by the impotence of their minds and the frailties of their nature. That men in spite of continual failure and of repeatedly-tested incompetence should continue the struggle and still hope on is at least an ennobling thought. I believe the quest to be fruitless, that is to say, that we cannot transcend our mortal faculties by any possible method so as to enable us to acquire and absorb immortal truth; but I no less feel that there is no branch of human inquiry so deserving of careful thought and none where the subtlety and ingenuity of the human mind have been exercised with greater effect than in this, and that it is the bounden duty of every student who believes that the goal of metaphysics is unattainable to know and to be able to answer why.

There are two conceivable ways in which man can acquire necessary and absolute truth. First, By inspiration or revelation from some other being who is its repository. Second, By the exercise of his own faculties. The former is the province of theology, the latter of metaphysics. It is with metaphysics alone that we are dealing, and this must be clearly understood. Hume, speaking as a philosopher, expressed in impatient language the contempt he felt for the common rabble and its creed. The common rabble has no part in the mysteries of metaphysics, nor is it directly affected by the conclusion which declares its goal a hopeless one. The common rabble is content to believe that the human mind and human faculties are limited and liable to err. If the quest for universal and necessary truth be therefore shown to be hopeless the proof involves no loss to the crowd, and is in fact largely the dissipation of a phantom which has been raised by metaphysicians themselves. The inquiry is one which lends itself naturally to historical treatment, since the possibilities of solving the difficulty have been tested by

an exhaustive process-a process which from its initial stage, when the question first loomed up on the horizon of human inquiry, to its final and logical conclusion, when it set behind the gay clouds of Neo-Platonism, was traversed by the Greeks in the course of their philosophical inquiries. I propose to give a short statement of this process, with a continual reference to the original authorities.

In order to begin at the beginning we must start at a point where the view of the common rabble was supreme, and when there was as yet no metaphysics. It is a difficult thing for us when sophisticated by a long course of study in which the thoughts of many ingenious men have been embroidered upon the web and woof of our own minds to realize the crudeness of scientific questions as they present themselves to untutored minds, and as they must have presented themselves to the Greeks at the beginning of their history. The myriad doubts and difficulties that assail us now had not then developed themselves. That human faculties are imperfect and fragile was doubtless a very early discovery, but this did not involve a complete scepticism, but the contrary. The occasional lapses of our faculties only acted as foils to the credit which was attached to their general statement. It was at a later stage that men professed to learn the strange lesson that not only are our faculties occasionally fragile, but that they delude us altogether, and continually palm off upon us a mere phantasm for a reality. To the early explorers the universe was held to be what it seems to us to be, that and nothing else, and the great problem they were troubled with was how to explain its origin and its purpose. This problem was faced with most dogmatic faith both in the competence of the answerer and the adequateness of his answer. That the universe is explainable, and that man is competent to explain it, are, in fact, the common postulates of all early inquiry.