Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/18

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PREFACE
xv

as I have seemed to myself to see philosophical reasons for such faith, and that I regard the whole issue as one for reason, in precisely the sense in which the properties of prime numbers and the kinetic theory of gases are matters for exact investigation. That all our beliefs about truth of any grade and that all theories have a practical meaning, I do indeed explicitly teach. That, in fact, as my reader will see, is my whole philosophy. But the process of coming to consciousness as to what we can rationally desire, mean, and believe, as the fulfilment of our highest purposes, is a process in which private desires must be subordinated. We must obey in order to triumph. And such obedience, for the student of philosophy, takes the form of a cool reflection and a patient wandering in the wilderness of ignorance until he sees the road home. That has been my own method in dealing with the problem of Immortality.

My treatment of the Problem of Evil, in the eighth and ninth lectures of the present volume, is inevitably, in the main, a restatement of what I have elsewhere repeatedly discussed. Yet I have tried to bring to light several new aspects of this issue, in particular its relation to the theory of the Temporal and the Eternal. The doctrine of Freedom and of the Moral Order, as presented in my later lectures, touches upon several matters that I have not before formally discussed. The discussion of the Union of God and Man, in the closing lecture, will also, as I hope, appeal to some theologically minded fellow-students as containing some relatively novel suggestions.

In sum, these lectures have tried to be not a perfunc-