nguage, in philosophy,
in mythology, in poetry, but we cannot argue a priori about them. We may
attempt to shake them off, but they are always returning, and in every
sphere of science and human action are tending to go beyond facts. They
are thought to be innate, because they have been familiar to us all our
lives, and we can no longer dismiss them from our mind. Many of them
express relations of terms to which nothing exactly or nothing at all in
rerum natura corresponds. We are not such free agents in the use of
them as we sometimes imagine. Fixed ideas have taken the most complete
possession of some thinkers who have been most determined to renounce
them, and have been vehemently affirmed when they could be least
explained and were incapable of proof. The world has often been led away
by a word to which no distinct meaning could be attached. Abstractions
such as 'authority,' 'equality,' 'utility,' 'liberty,' 'pleasure,'
'experience,' 'consciousness,' 'chance,' 'substance,' 'matter,' 'atom,'
and a heap of other metaphysical and theological terms, are the source
of quite as much error and illusion and have as little relation
to actual facts as the ideas of Plato. Few students of theology or
philosophy have sufficiently reflected how quickly the bloom of a
philosophy passes away; or how hard it is for one age to understand the
writings of another; or how nice a judgment is required of those who are
seeking to express the philosophy of one age in the terms of another.
The 'eternal truths' of which metaphysicians speak have hardly ever
lasted more than a generation. In our own day schools or systems of
philosophy which have once been famous have died before the founders of
them. We are still, as in Plato's age, groping about for a new method
more comprehensive than any of those which now prevail; and also more
permanent. And we seem to see at a distance the promise of such a
method, which can hardly be any other than the method of idealized
experience, having roots which strike far down into the history of
philosophy. It is a method which does not divorce the present from the
past, or the part from the whole, or the abstract from the concrete,
or theory from fact, or the divine from the human, or one science
from another, but labours to connect them. Along such a road we have
proceeded a few steps, sufficient, perhaps, to make us reflect on the
want of method which prevails in our own day. In another age, all the
branches