God and Freedom in Human Experience: Containing the Donnellan Lectures for the Year 1913-14, Delivered Before the University of Dublin (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from God and Freedom in Human Experience: Containing the Donnellan Lectures for the Year 1913-14, Delivered Before the University of Dublin

Philosophy is intensely alive at the present moment. Never at any time in the history of thought were the materials so abundant, the interest so widely spread, the concentration of mind upon the noblest of themes so great. Nor can it be said that any one nation can claim pre - eminence. France, indeed, can point to the most original intellect; but none of the other great peoples is behind her in vigour of thought and patience of research.

The aim of these lectures is to show that the new investigations which the world owes in the main to M. Bergson supply the means of a further advance along the path which had been marked out by the great succession of the immortals. The Idealism which the modern world owes to Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and T. H. Green, has been subjected to a very thoroughgoing criticism, but its fundamental principles have not been destroyed. We have learned that the closed system which it seemed to create is not the perfect thing that many of us imagined in the young enthusiasm which possessed us thirty years ago. At the feet of Lotze, Bradley, Ward, James, and others, we have learned its defects but we have not ceased to discern its intrinsic value. And we have discovered that its failure to answer many questions is one of the best things about it.

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