Page:Riddles of the Sphinx (1891).djvu/5

PREFACE.

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It is the privilege of a preface that it enables the author to deprecate some misconception of the scope and tendencies of his work by a preliminary explanation. And this privilege is doubly valuable when the author has to excuse himself for writing a book upon subjects of the highest human interest. For he feels that it is no adequate excuse to plead that the condition of philosophy is such that his efforts cannot make it worse, and still less that the conclusions to which he has been led by many years of reflection may present some degree of novelty. He knows that real or apparent novelty is the greatest obstacle to success, even in this most progressive century, and that the mental attitude which was ever eager “to hear some new thing” is as extinct as the “Attic salt” which seasoned the disputations of the ancient philosophers. And the more fundamental the ideas are, upon which change is alleged to be necessary, the more violent is the resistance with which novel doctrines are resented. There is no subject, therefore, on which mankind is more conservative, and more unintelligently conservative, than metaphysics, and a novelty in metaphysics is met as coldly as a novelty in fashions is welcomed warmly. So far, then, from priding himself upon his novelty, the author would rather hope