these terms. Mr. Balfour expressly defines his subject-matter as "a systematic account of the grounds of belief and disbelief," and he is at pains in his introductory chapter to distinguish the inquiry most carefully from psychology, on the one hand, so far as that investigates merely the growth and causes of a belief, and on the other hand from metaphysics or ontology.[1]
For on this side also the line requires to be drawn. If epistemology is not to be confounded with psychology on the one hand, neither is it to be identified with metaphysics on the other. The prevalent confusion in English philosophy between the two first has been well exposed by Kantian and Hegelian writers, but some of them have themselves fallen into a new confusion between epistemology and metaphysics. A considerable section of my last course of Balfour Lectures[2] was devoted, indeed, to showing that English Neo-Kantianism, as it
- ↑ As regards a name for the inquiry thus isolated and defined, Mr. Balfour proposes the term Philosophy, acknowledging at the same time that this application is not exactly sanctioned by usage. If it were at all possible to appropriate the general term, Philosophy, in a specific sense, there might be much to say for this innovation. Many arguments in its favor might be drawn even from the vague sense which the term bears in current usage. In modern times, and within the present century in particular, Philosophy is very frequently used in the schools as equivalent to Epistemology or Theory of Knowledge. But in spite of this, it seems to me hopeless (and undesirable) to cut ourselves loose from the tradition of more than two thousand years, which associates the term irrevocably with metaphysical or ontological speculation. By metaphysics or ontology I mean some kind of theory or no-theory of the ultimate nature of things. Such a metaphysical theory is that to which all other philosophical inquiries lead up, that in which they culminate, and it seems to me undesirable to define philosophy in such a way as to exclude from its scope what has hitherto been considered its heart and soul. I confess, indeed, that if we are to narrow the term at all, I should be inclined to identify philosophy rather with metaphysics or ontology. The claim on behalf of epistemology, as I take it, is that it lays the substructure; it is the necessary preliminary alike of science and of metaphysics. But it may as fairly be argued on the other side that the ultimate or culminating science has the best claim to the time-honored title. Happily, however, we are not reduced to an aimless wrangle of this description, for Epistemology is just the single term we want. Philosophy will doubtless remain in its indefiniteness as a generic title, associated now more closely with theory of knowledge, now more closely with metaphysics; while epistemology (overlapping into logic), metaphysics or ontology, and ethics (which as metaphysic of ethics is connected in the most intimate way with any ultimate theory of things) while these three at least, to mention no more at present, are covered by her ample ægis.
- ↑ Hegelianism and Personality.
