And for my own part I cannot do more than put them forward in a very feeble and halting manner. For I have come upon them, not in the way of feeling or direct apprehension, but as the result of a series of works undertaken purely with the desire to know--a desire which did not lift itself to the height of expecting or looking for the beautiful or the good, but which simply asked for something to know. For I found myself--and many others I find do so also--I found myself in respect to knowledge like a man who is in the midst of plenty and yet who cannot find anything to eat. All around me were the evidences of knowledge--the arts, the sciences, interesting talk, useful inventions--and yet I myself was profited nothing at all; for somehow, amidst all this activity, I was left alone, I could get nothing which I could know. The dialect was foreign to me--its inner meaning was hidden. If I would, imitating the utterance of my fellows, say a few words, the effort was forced, the whole result was an artificiality, and, if successful, would be but a plausible imposture. The word “sceptical” has a certain unpleasant association attached to it, for it has been used by so many people who are absolutely certain in a particular line, and attack other people’s convictions. But to be sceptical in the real sense is a far more unpleasant state of mind to the sceptic than to any one of his companions. For to a mind that inquires into what it really does know, it is hardly possible to enunciate complete sentences, much less to put before it those complex ideas which have so large a part in true human life. Every word we use has so wide and fugitive a meaning, and every expression touches or rather grazes fact by so very minute a point, that, if we wish to start with something which we do know, and thence proceed in a certain manner, we are forced away from the study of reality and driven to an artificial system, such as logic or mathematics, which, starting from postulates and axioms, develops a body of ideal truth which rather comes into contact with nature than is nature. Scientific achievement is reserved for those who are content to absorb into their consciousness, by any means and by whatever way they come, the varied appearances of nature, whence and in which by reflection they find floating as it were on the sea of the unknown, certain similarities, certain resemblances and analogies, by means of which they collect together a body of possible predictions and inferences; and in nature they find correspondences which are actually verified. Hence science exists, although the conceptions in the mind cannot be said to have any real correspondence in nature. We form a set of conceptions in the mind, and the relations between these conceptions give us relations which we find actually vibrating in the world around us. But the conceptions themselves are essentially artificial.