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Updated: May 11, 2025
If the metaphysic of these writers had been a thousandfold more superficial than it was, what mattered that, so long as they had vision for every one of the great social improvements on which the progress and even the very life of the nation depended?
But for our minds there must needs be a "critical point" in any such imagined continuity; so that the world where life and thought are carried on apart from matter, must certainly rank again as a new, a =metetherial= environment. In giving it this name I expressly imply only that from our human point of view it lies after or beyond the ether, as metaphysic lies after or beyond physics.
I shall then briefly sketch the nature of that fundamental science which I believe to be the true metaphysic, in which mind and matter alike are seen to be constructed out of a neutral stuff, whose causal laws have no such duality as that of psychology, but form the basis upon which both physics and psychology are built.
Like many other termini technici, it must be understood historically; just as logic, metaphysic, analytic, organon, etc., can only be apprehended and understood historically.
The historian is not called upon to investigate the first cause or final causes any more than the chemist or the naturalist. And, in fact, few writers on history nowadays stop to discuss the theory of Providence in its theological form. But the tendency to explain historical facts by transcendental causes survives in more modern theories in which metaphysic is disguised under scientific forms.
How illustrative of monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the phraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the writings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarship throughout! A scholar writing for the scholarly, he will of course leave something to the willing intelligence of his reader.
But in the third place, since a metaphysic of morals, in spite of the; discouraging title, is yet capable of being presented in a popular form, and one adapted to the common understanding, I find it useful to separate from it this preliminary treatise on its fundamental principles, in order that I may not hereafter have need to introduce these necessarily subtle discussions into a book of a more simple character.
And here, very properly, the sceptic steps in and riddles the ad hoc metaphysic of the dogmatist with unanswerable objections. No Cambridge Rationalist can presume to deny that I feel a certain emotion, but the moment I attempt to prove the existence of its object I lay myself open to a bad four hours.
It amounts, truly, to the same thing as Aryan Theosophy; but where the latter travels through and illuminates immense realms of thought and metaphysic, Taoism slides gently into the Absolute; as who should laugh and say, You see how easy it is! And you do not hear of the Path of Sorrow, as with the Aryans; Tao is a path of sly laughter and delight.
We hold to the metaphysic fiction of man having always been the same, and only his circumstances having changed; not admitting that the very change of circumstances implies something new in the man who altered them; and similarly we shrink from the thought of the many things which we used never to notice, and which it has required a class of men endowed with special powers of vision to find out, copy, and teach us to see and appreciate.
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