Hence any philosophical thinking which is not founded {ix} upon a thorough study of the systems of the past will necessarily be shallow and worthless. And the notions that we can dispense with this study, and do everything out of our own heads, that everyone is to be his own philosopher, and is competent to construct his own system in his own way--such ideas are utterly empty and hollow. Of these truths, indeed, we see a notable example in what the writer just quoted styles his "metaphysic." This so-called metaphysic is wholly based upon the assumption that knowledge and its object exist, each on its own account, external to one another, the one here, the other there over against it, and that knowledge is an "instrument" which in this external manner takes hold of its object and makes it its own. The very moment the word "instrument" is used here, all the rest, including the invalidity of knowledge, follows as a matter of course. Such assumption then--that knowledge is an "instrument"--our writer makes, wholly uncritically, and without a shadow of right. He gives no sign that it has ever even occurred to him that this is an assumption, that it needs any enquiry, or that it is possible for anyone to think otherwise. Yet anyone who will take the trouble, not merely superficially to dip into the history of philosophy, but thoroughly to submit himself to its discipline, will at least learn that this is an assumption, a very doubtful assumption, too, which no one now has the right to foist upon the public without discussion as if it were an axiomatic truth. He might even learn that it is a false assumption. And he will note, as an ominous sign, that the subjectivism which permeates and directs the whole course of Mr. Wells's thinking is identical in character with that {x} subjectivism which was the essential feature of the decay and _downfall_ of the Greek philosophic spirit, and was the cause of its final _ruin_ and _dissolution_. I would counsel the young, therefore, to pay no attention to plausible and shallow words such as those quoted, but, before forming their own philosophic opinions, most thoroughly and earnestly to study and master the history of past philosophies, first the Greek and then the modern. That this cannot be done merely by reading a modern resume of that history, but only by studying the great thinkers in their own works, is true. But philosophical education must begin, and the function of such books as this, is, not to complete it, but to begin it; and to obtain first of all a general view of what must afterwards be studied in detail is no bad way of beginning. Moreover, the study of the development and historical connexions of the various philosophies, which is not found in the original writings themselves, will always provide a work for histories of philosophy to do. Two omissions in this book require, perhaps, a word of explanation.