Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ... these negative results the practical temper either of these thinkers or of the English people is adequately reflected. There is a deep religious earnestness native to the English mind which ever holds practically to the great verities, even where theory fails. The very cutting loose from traditions, eminently characteristic of the thinkers we have been considering, is, in a deep sense, faith in the individual and in his validity! English institutions eloquently point in the same direction. It is the same with English poetry, where George S. Morris says we find the best English philosophy, from Spenser, influenced by the Platonic revival, and Shakespeare, "the poet of the moral order," to Tennyson, with his message of "self-reverence, self-knowledge, selfcontrol." It is Philonous who says to Hylas, as his parting words, "You see, Hylas, the water of yonder fountain, how it is forced upwards, in a round column, to a certain height; at which it breaks, and falls back into the basin from whence it rose, its ascent as well as descent proceeding from the same uniform law or principle.... Just so, the same principles which, at first view, lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common-sense." In a deeper and better sense than even Berkeley knew, this loosely symbolizes English philosophy coming to its own. When it really shall have come to its own, it will have consciously achieved the inevitable dialectical advance to a recognition of the problem of the person as the one problem where empiricism crucially defeats itself and in the triumph of that defeat lifts the person beyond mere experience. And then English philosophy will no longer be insular. CHAPTER Vm SUGGESTIONS FOR RECONSTRUCTION While the exact scope of the...
