we must all make for ourselves.  We may listen and read, but the views of others we cannot take on credit; we must rethink them and “make them our own.”  And we cannot do without fundamental beliefs, explicit or implicit.  The bulk of men are obliged to be amateur philosophers,—­all men indeed who are not specialized students of philosophical subjects,—­even if their philosophical enterprise goes no further than prompt recognition of and submission to Authority.

And it is not only the claim of the specialist that I would repudiate.  People are too apt to suppose that in order to discuss morals a man must have exceptional moral gifts.  I would dispute that naive supposition.  I am an ingenuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity for religious feeling, but neither a prophet nor a saint.  On the whole I should be inclined to classify myself as a bad man rather than a good; not indeed as any sort of picturesque scoundrel or non-moral expert, but as a person frequently irritable, ungenerous and forgetful, and intermittently and in small but definite ways bad.  One thing I claim, I have got my beliefs and theories out of my life and not fitted them to its circumstances.  As often as not I have learnt good by the method of difference; by the taste of the alternative.  I tell this faith I hold as I hold it and I sketch out the principles by which I am generally trying to direct my life at the present time, because it interests me to do so and I think it may interest a certain number of similarly constituted people.  I am not teaching.  How far I succeed or fail in that private and personal attempt to behave well, has nothing to do with the matter of this book.  That is another story, a reserved and private affair.  I offer simply intellectual experiences and ideas.

It will be necessary to take up the most abstract of these questions of belief first, the metaphysical questions.  It may be that to many readers the opening sections may seem the driest and least attractive.  But I would ask them to begin at the beginning and read straight on, because much that follows this metaphysical book cannot be appreciated at its proper value without a grasp of these preliminaries.

BOOK THE FIRST.

Metaphysics.

1.1.  The necessity for metaphysics.

As a preliminary to that experiment in mutual confession from which this book arose, I found it necessary to consider and state certain truths about the nature of knowledge, about the meaning of truth and the value of words, that is to say I found I had to begin by being metaphysical.  In writing out these notes now I think it is well that I should state just how important I think this metaphysical prelude is.