LECTURE I NOTE C—P. 7.

UNCONSCIOUS METAPHYSIC.

Schopenhauer has remarked that each man has his metaphysic.

“The man,” says Zeller, “who is without any philosophic standpoint is not on that account without any standpoint whatever; he who has formed no scientific opinion on philosophical questions has an unscientific opinion about them.”—Pre-Soc. Phil. p. 23.

Principal Fairbairn observes: “Professor Tyndall’s presidential address is memorable enough, were it only as an instance of sweet simplicity in things historical, and the most high-flying metaphysics disguised in scientific terms.”—Studies, p. 65.

Regarding Mr. Spencer: “Just as the term force revolutionises the conception of the Unknowable, so it, in turn, transmuted into forces, beguiles the physicist into the fancy that he is walking in the, to him, sober and certain paths of observation and experiment, while in truth he is soaring in the heaven of metaphysics.”—Ibid. p. 97.

Professor Caird remarks of Comte: “Hence, while he pretends to renounce metaphysics, he has committed himself to one of the most indefensible of all metaphysical positions. . . . It is a residuum of bad metaphysics, which, by a natural Nemesis, seems almost invariably to haunt the minds of those writers who think they have renounced metaphysics altogether.”—Soc. Phil. of Comte, p. 121.