life; what may I believe about God and Duty, about
the world and its ultimate meaning, about the soul and its destiny?'
For such purposes solutions stopping short of what will fully satisfy
the legitimate demands of the professed Metaphysician may be all that
is necessary, or at least all that is possible for those who are not
intending to make a serious and elaborate study of Metaphysic. I have
no sympathy with the attempt to base Religion upon anything but honest
enquiry into truth: and yet the professed Philosophers are just those
who will most readily recognize that there are--if not what are
technically called degrees of truth--still different levels of thought,
different degrees of adequacy and systematic completeness, even within
the limits of thoroughly philosophical thinking. I shall assume that
you are not content to remain at the level of ordinary unreflecting
Common-sense or of merely traditional Religion--that you do want (so
far as time and opportunity serve) to get to the bottom of things, {5}
but that you will be content in such a course as the present if I can
suggest to you, or help you to form for yourselves, an outline--what
Plato would call the _hypotyposis_ of a theory of the Universe which
may still fall very far short of a finished and fully articulated
metaphysical system.

I suppose that to nearly everybody who sets himself down to think
seriously about the riddle of the Universe there very soon occurs the
question whether Materialism may not contain the solution of all
difficulties. I think, therefore, our present investigation had better
begin with an enquiry whether Materialism can possibly be true. I say
'can be true' rather than 'is true,' because, though dogmatic
Materialists are rare, the typical Agnostic is one who is at least
inclined to admit the possibility of Materialism, even when he does
not, at the bottom of his mind, practically assume its truth. The man
who is prepared to exclude even this one theory of the Universe from
the category of possible but unprovable theories is not, properly
speaking, an Agnostic. To know that Materialism at least is not true
is to know something, and something very important, about the ultimate
nature of things. I shall not attempt here any very precise definition
of what is meant by Materialism. Strictly speaking, it ought to mean
the view that nothing really exists but matter. But the existence, in
some sense or {6} other, of our sensati