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. CONTENTS. PAGE LIFORNIA Y BRITISH THOUGHT AND THINKERS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL ATTITUDE OF THE ENGLISH MIND. SCHOPENHAUER made a familiar thought famous by putting it in a simple but striking and epigrammatic form. Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung, said he. The world is for me an idea. It is a representation in my mind. To how many of us has not this thought occurred, with something of a dazing, dreamy effect, as we have mused on the complete dependence of our idea of the universe, or all that therein may be, on our own minds! I can remember how, as a mere boy, more than once, in an evening reverie, an experience somewhat in this vein came to me. All my boyish ideas of things seemed, as pure creations of my own fancy, to melt away, and there remained, as the whole sum and substance of the universe, only the abstract, but otherwise empty and uninstructive, and, by any law of sufficient reason, inexplicable, necessity of being, plus a dull, confused, and yet thoroughly unique, and for this reason indescribable, sensation, as of a chaos of shapeless elements, moving noiselessly among each other-a plenum of scarcely greater value than an absolute vacuum. Then came the return to what is termed the literal fact of experience, or, better, to the world such as, under the influence of a dawning mental activity, guided by sensitive experience and by instruction, it had actually shaped itself in my imagination the earth, with its green fields and forest-covered mountains, the world-inhabited heavens, the changing seasons, man and his past history and unrevealed earthly destiny, not to mention the myriad little and familiar things which would necessarily crowd the foreground of such a picture in a boy's mind. The view which a moment before had demonstrated so signally its capability of dissolving, recovered its relative consistency and became again a slowly-changing panorama of a world, or of “the world," as it was for me. It was into such a conception of a world-a conception kaleidoscopic, apparently half arbitrary, half accidental — that I, following unwittingly a bent common to the universal mind of man, was more or less blindly seeking to introduce order and permanence. What must be? Why must anything be? Why must all things be? Such a rock of rational necessity as a successful answer to these questions would have furnished I was (though unconscious of the full significance of my striving) seeking, in order to arrest and fix the quicksands of a Vorstellung, or idea of the universe, of which I only knew (with Schopenhauer) that it was mine. I need hardly say that the immediate result of my reflections was tolerably negative. I have indicated, however, in the narration of this experience, the elements of a problem which presents itself to mankind in all climes and ages. It is, if I may so express it, to effectuate a sort of rational anatomy of existence, or, at least, of our ideas of it. The |