se issues the young science student is as apt to
dismiss as Rot, and the young classical student as Gas, and the austere
student of the science of Economics as Theorising, unsuitable for his
methods of research.

In our achievement of understandings in the place of these evasions
about fundamental things lies the road, I believe, along which the human
mind can escape, if ever it is to escape, from the confusion of purposes
that distracts it at the present time.

1.2. THE RESUMPTION OF METAPHYSICAL ENQUIRY.

It seems to me that the Greek mind up to the disaster of the Macedonian
Conquest was elaborately and discursively discussing these questions of
the forms and methods of thought and that the discussion was abruptly
closed and not naturally concluded, summed up hastily as it were, in the
career and lecturings of Aristotle.

Since then the world never effectually reopened these questions until
the modern period. It went on from Plato and Aristotle just as the
art of the seventeenth and eighteenth century went on from Raphael and
Michael Angelo. Effectual criticism was absolutely silent until
the Renaissance, and then for a time was but a matter of scattered
utterances having only the slightest collective effect. In the past
half century there has begun a more systematic critical movement in the
general mind, a movement analogous to the Pre-Raphaelite movement in
art--a Pre-Aristotelian movement, a scepticism about things supposed to
be settled for all time, a resumed inquiry into the fundamental laws
of thought, a harking back to positions of the older philosophers and
particularly to Heraclitus, so far as the surviving fragments of his
teaching enable one to understand him, and a new forward movement from
that recovered ground.

1.3. THE WORLD OF FACT.

Necessarily when one begins an inquiry into the fundamental nature
of oneself and one's mind and its processes, one is forced into
autobiography. I begin by asking how the conscious mind with which I am
prone to identify myself, began.

It presents itself to me as a history of a perception of the world
of facts opening out from an accidental centre at which I happened to
begin.

I do not attempt to define this word fact. Fact expresses for me
something in its nature primary and unanalyzable. I start from that. I
take as a typical statement of fact that I sit here at my desk writing
with a fountain pen on a pad of ruled scribbling paper, that th