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Updated: May 20, 2025
It has always seemed strange to me, that though mankind hate metaphysics, they are all natural metaphysicians, especially when a little wined. Perhaps the true reason may be, that as wine came from the gods, it is endued with the power of raising us to its source.
Froude was a good Greek scholar, and he had the true Oxford reverence for Butler. But he had not gone deeper into philosophy than his examinations and his pupils required. He liked positive results, and metaphysicians always suggested to him the movements of a squirrel in a cage. The alternative to business was literature.
The time would fail me if I attempted to do justice to the memory of all the illustrious men who, during that period, taught or learned wisdom within these ancient walls; geometricians, anatomists, jurists, philologists, metaphysicians, poets: Simpson and Hunter, Millar and Young, Reid and Stewart; Campbell, whose coffin was lately borne to a grave in that renowned transept which contains the dust of Chaucer, of Spenser, and of Dryden; Black, whose discoveries form an era in the history of chemical science; Adam Smith, the greatest of all the masters of political science; James Watt, who perhaps did more than any single man has done, since the New Atlantis of Bacon was written, to accomplish that glorious prophecy.
Metaphysicians sometimes so define the good as to make it a matter of no importance; not seldom they give that name to the sum of all evils. A good, absolute in the sense of being divorced from all natural demand and all possible satisfaction, would be as remote as possible from goodness: to call it good is mere disloyalty to morals, brought about by some fantastic or dialectical passion.
Metaphysicians, indeed, hold that the object of their researches, far from being symbolic and abstract, as in science, or fictitious and imaginary, as in art, is the very essence of things, absolute reality. Unfortunately, they have never proven that it suffices to seek in order to find, and to wish in order to get. The second stage is critical.
In the perusal of those early writers , he was struck with the profoundest veneration of the simplicity and purity of their doctrines, the holiness of their lives, and the sanctity of the discipline practised by them; but, as he descended to the lower ages, found the peace of Christianity broken by useless controversies, and its doctrines sophisticated by the subtilties of the schools: he found the holy writers interpreted according to the notions of philosophers, and the chimeras of metaphysicians adopted as articles of faith: he found difficulties raised by niceties, and fomented to bitterness and rancour: he saw the simplicity of the christian doctrine corrupted by the private fancies of particular parties, while each adhered to its own philosophy, and orthodoxy was confined to the sect in power.
To the same region of speculation belongs all that can be said respecting the distinction which the German metaphysicians and their French and English followers so elaborately draw between the acts of the mind and its merely passive states; between what it receives from, and what it gives to, the crude materials of its experience.
There are many physicists and physiologists who think and speak as materialists, though they have made up their minds to remain on the battle-ground of observed facts and have a holy horror of metaphysics. In a certain sense, it may be said that materialism is the metaphysics of those who refuse to be metaphysicians.
The theories of metaphysicians on these lofty themes he regards as personal postulates which, in so far as they cannot be subjected to the pragmatic method, must remain open questions. Human experience does not warrant such gratuitous demands.
Ignorant clodpoles, when once entranced by the grand Mesmeric fluid, could spout philosophy diviner than Plato ever wrote, descant upon the mysteries of the mind with more eloquence and truth than the profoundest metaphysicians the world ever saw, and solve knotty points of divinity with as much ease as waking men could undo their shoe-buckles!
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