THOUGHT AND THINKERS: INTRODUCTORY STUDIES, CRITICAL, BIOGRAPHICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL. BY GEORGE S. MORRIS, A M., AND LECTURER ON PHILOSOPHY IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE; CHICAGO: S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 1880. F AN LIBR COPYRIGHT, 1880, BY S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. PRESS OF KNIGHT & LEONARD DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY, BINDERS. PREFACE. THE first eleven chapters of this volume are founded, with slight changes (consisting mainly in amplification of the theoretical portions of chapters VII, IX and X), on "public lectures" recently delivered before a mixed audience of ladies and gentlemen at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Simultaneously with their delivery, another, more extended and technical, course, on the history of British speculation from Bacon to Spencer, was in progress, attended only by university students. To this course, the lectures here in substance reproduced were partly introductory, while in part they were intended to present a general summary of results reached and illustrated in more profuse detail in the special course. From the foregoing statements the scope and purpose of this volume may be inferred. It is introductory, rather than exhaustive. an invitation to reflective and systematic study, rather than a substitute for it. At the same time, I hope, by the expression of deliberate and reasoned opinions, to have pointed the way to correct views concerning the essential nature and value of the most conspicuous current of abstract thought in the English language. I have not thought it needful to make radical changes in the style by which the material here employed was first adapted for use in the lecture-room. The large biographical element in more than half of the chapters will not be unwelcome to those who realize that a thinker's life is one of the indispensable keys to the due appreciation of his thought; and I cannot but confidently wish that some, through the allurements of biography, may be won over to the serious contemplation of the grand problems of philosophic thought and to a quickened sense, both of their dignity and of their absolute and vital import. By the addition of a chapter on Herbert Spencer the main thought of the volume is followed out of the British past into the immediate present. GEORGE S. MORRIS. ANN ARBOR, MICH., September 14, 1880. |