MODERN THINKERS AND PRESENT PROBLEMS AN APPROACH TO MODERN PHILOSOPHY THROUGH ITS HISTORY BY EDGAR A. SINGER, Jr., Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1923 Copyright, 1923, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY PRINTED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE These papers, which had been written from time to time and for various occasions, have been brought together without any attempt to make them tell a smooth unbroken story, yet not without regard to their connectedness. They have sometimes served me to bring before the mind of youth certain problems on which philosophers have thought again and again. But if they have had any interest for youth, if they are to have any for maturity, it can only be because the names that stand over the chapters might, if moments had names, be those of moments in each man’s history. And as such, unless I have altogether failed to make my characters real, these names will be recognized. Who has not sometime been that Bruno who stepped from his Father’s House, where all had revolved so solicitously about himself, to find without the cold stars gazing down on his atomy from their places in endless emptiness? Who has not come to feel, with Spinoza, those inviolable laws of mechanism which govern the world about him creeping into his own inmost being, threatening there all that he had so simply and yet so dearly clung to as his freedom and autonomy? How many reflecting in their maturity on the unquestioning faiths of their childhood have thought to bring these to the test of such experience as natural science depends on, only to find, as Hume found, these faiths unconfirmed? And of those who have lived through this moment of disillusionment, there will always be some who will have come in their own way to the position severe reasoning forced on Kant: The spiritual aspects of reality are not issues of science and intellection, but belong to that other order of truth grasped by the “practical reason.” Others, meanwhile, will have refused to let their speculation go beyond the insight experience yields, and of these some at least will have found that experience holds out nothing hopeful for now or forever. They will have seen with Schopenhauer into the “deep abyss” and found at the bottom of it only this counsel: Not-being is better than being.