METAPHYSICS. The term " metaphysic " was used by commentators on Aristotle to denote the books which came after the writings of the philosopher on Physics. Metaphysics then came to mean the inquiry into the ultimate nature of Being, an inquiry which comprehends morality, religion, and politics. Aristotle himself described this part of philosophy as First (that is to say, Fundamental) Philosophy, and the other part (Physics) as Second Philosophy. Some systems of thought (Posi tivism, Naturalism, Agnosticism, Materialism) are un metaphysical, since they deny the possibility of meta physical knowledge. The metaphysical inquiry is a search for truth, which is unending, because, as William James says, the only indefectible certain truth is the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. " No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gent lam, the instincts of the heart, or the systematized experience of the race. Others make the perceptive moment its own test—Descartes, for instance, with his clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with his ' common-sense '; and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment a priori. The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other— are standards which, in turn, have been used. The much-lauded objective evidence is never triumphantly there; it is a mere aspiration or Gretizbegriff, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking life. To claim
that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say that when you think them true and they are true, then their evidence ds objective, otherwise it is not. But practically one's conviction that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contradictory array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been claimed! The world is rational through and through—its existence is an ultimate brute fact: there is a personal God—a personal God is inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately known— the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral impera tive exists—obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent spiritual principle is in every one—there are only shifting states of mind; there is an endless chain of causes—there is an absolute first cause; an eternal necessity—a freedom; a purpose—no purpose; a primal One—a primal Many; a universal continuity—an essential discontinuity in things: an infinity—no infinity. There is this—there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true, while his neighbour deemed it absolutely false: and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it be truth or no " (The Will to Believe, 1908, p. 15).