First and Last Things | Page 6

take thought about thought. Those
other ardent spirits on the contrary, want to plunge into action or controversy or belief
without taking thought; they feel that there is not time to examine thought. "While you
think," they say, "the house is burning." They are the kin of those who rush and struggle
and make panics in theatre fires.
Now it seems to me that most of the troubles of humanity are really misunderstandings.
Men's compositions and characters are, I think, more similar than their views, and if they
had not needlessly different modes of expression upon many broad issues, they would be
practically at one upon a hundred matters where now they widely differ.
Most of the great controversies of the world, most of the wide religious differences that
keep men apart, arise from this: from differences in their way of thinking. Men imagine
they stand on the same ground and mean the same thing by the same words, whereas they
stand on slightly different grounds, use different terms for the same thing and express the
same thing in different words. Logomachies, conflicts about words,--into such
death-traps of effort those ardent spirits run and perish.
This is now almost a commonplace; it has been said before by numberless people. It has
been said before by numberless people, but it seems to me it has been realised by very
few--and until it is realised to the fullest extent, we shall continue to live at intellectual
cross purposes and waste the forces of our species needlessly and abundantly.
This persuasion is a very important thing in my mind.
I think that the time has come when the human mind must take up metaphysical
discussion again--when it must resume those subtle but necessary and unavoidable
problems that it dropped unsolved at the close of the period of Greek freedom, when it
must get to a common and general understanding upon what its ideas of truth, good, and
beauty amount to, and upon the relation of the name to the thing, and of the relation of
one mind to another mind in the matter of resemblance and the matter of difference--upon
all those issues the young science student is as apt to dismiss as Rot, and the young
classical student as Gas, and the austere student of the science of Economics as
Theorising, unsuitable for his methods of research.

In our achievement of understandings in the place of these evasions about fundamental
things lies the road, I believe, along which the human mind can escape, if ever it is to
escape, from the confusion of purposes that distracts it at the present time.
1.2. THE RESUMPTION OF METAPHYSICAL ENQUIRY.
It seems to me that the Greek mind up to the disaster of the Macedonian Conquest was
elaborately and discursively discussing these questions of the forms and methods of
thought and that the discussion was abruptly closed and not naturally concluded, summed
up hastily as it were, in the career and lecturings of Aristotle.
Since then the world never effectually reopened these questions until the modern period.
It went on from Plato and Aristotle just as the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth
century went on from Raphael and Michael Angelo. Effectual criticism was absolutely
silent until the Renaissance, and then for a time was but a matter of scattered utterances
having only the slightest collective effect. In the past half century there has begun a more
systematic critical movement in the general mind, a movement analogous to the
Pre-Raphaelite movement in art--a Pre-Aristotelian movement, a scepticism about things
supposed to be settled for all time, a resumed inquiry into the fundamental laws of
thought, a harking back to positions of the older philosophers and particularly to
Heraclitus, so far as the surviving fragments of his teaching enable one to understand him,
and a new forward movement from that recovered ground.
1.3. THE WORLD OF FACT.
Necessarily when one begins an inquiry into the fundamental nature of oneself and one's
mind and its processes, one is forced into autobiography. I begin by asking how the
conscious mind with which I am prone to identify myself, began.
It presents itself to me as a history of a perception of the world of facts opening out from
an accidental centre at which I happened to begin.
I do not attempt to define this word fact. Fact expresses for me something in its nature
primary and unanalyzable. I start from that. I take as a typical statement of fact that I sit
here at my desk writing with a fountain pen on a pad of ruled scribbling paper, that the
sunlight falls upon me and throws the shadow of my window mullion across the page,
that Peter, my cat, sleeps on the window-seat close at hand and that this