We may, for convenience, group together these deeper questions regarding the nature of knowledge and its scope, and call the subject of our study “Epistemology.”

But it should be remarked, in the first place, that, when we work in this field, we are exercising a reflective analysis of precisely the type employed in making the metaphysical analyses contained in the earlier chapters of this book.  We are treating our experience as it is not treated in common thought and in science.

And it should be remarked, in the second place, that the investigation of our knowledge inevitably runs together with an investigation into the nature of things known, of the mind and the world.  Suppose that I give the titles of the chapters in Part III of Mr. Hobhouse’s able work on “The Theory of Knowledge.”  They are as follows:  Validity; the Validity of Knowledge; the Conception of External Reality; Substance; the Conception of Self; Reality as a System; Knowledge and Reality; the Grounds of Knowledge and Belief.

Are not these topics metaphysical?  Let us ask ourselves how it would affect our views of the validity and of the limits of our knowledge, if we were converted to the metaphysical doctrines of John Locke, or of Bishop Berkeley, or of David Hume, or of Thomas Reid, or of Immanuel Kant.

We may, then, regard epistemology as a part of logic—­the metaphysical part—­or as a part of metaphysics; it does not much matter which we call it, since we mean the same thing.  But its relation to metaphysics is such that it does not seem worth while to call it a separate discipline.

Before leaving this subject there is one more point upon which I should touch, if only to obviate a possible misunderstanding.

We find in Professor Cornelius’s clear little book, “An Introduction to Philosophy” (Leipzig, 1903; it has unhappily not yet been translated into English), that metaphysics is repudiated altogether, and epistemology is set in its place.  But this rejection of metaphysics does not necessarily imply the denial of the value of such an analysis of our experience as I have in this work called metaphysical.  Metaphysics is taken to mean, not an analysis of experience, but a groping behind the veil of phenomena for some reality not given in experience.  In other words, what Professor Cornelius condemns is what many of the rest of us also condemn under another name.  What he calls metaphysics, we call bad metaphysics; and what he calls epistemology, we call metaphysics.  The dispute is really a dispute touching the proper name to apply to reflective analysis of a certain kind.

As it is the fashion in certain quarters to abuse metaphysics, I set the reader on his guard.  Some kinds of metaphysics certainly ought to be repudiated under whatever name they may be presented to us.

CHAPTER XX

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION