First and Last Things | Page 5

their whole lives to the sustained analysis of this or that among the questions I
discuss, and there is a literature so enormous in the aggregate that only a specialist
scholar could hope to know it. I have not been unmindful of these professors and this
literature; I have taken such opportunities as I have found, to test my propositions by

them. But I feel that such apology as one makes for amateurishness in this field has a
lesser quality of self-condemnation than if one were dealing with narrower, more defined
and fact-laden matters. There is more excuse for one here than for the amateur maker of
chemical theories, or the man who evolves a system of surgery in his leisure. These
things, chemistry, surgery and so forth, we may take on the reputation of an expert, but
our own fundamental beliefs, our rules of conduct, 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.

There is a popular prejudice against metaphysics as something at once difficult and
fruitless, as an idle system of enquiries remote from any human interest. I suppose this
odd misconception arose from the vulgar pretensions of the learned, from their appeal to
ancient names and their quotations in unfamiliar tongues, and from the easy fall into
technicality of men struggling to be explicit where a high degree of explicitness is
impossible. But it needs erudition and accumulated and alien literature to make
metaphysics obscure, and some of the most fruitful and able metaphysical discussion in
the world was conducted by a number of unhampered men in small Greek cities, who
knew no language but their own and had scarcely a technical term. The true
metaphysician is after all only a person who says, "Now let us take a thought for a
moment before we fall into a discussion of the broad questions of life, lest we rush hastily
into impossible and needless conflict. What is the exact value of these thoughts we are
thinking and these words we are using?" He wants to