Nor ought this procedure to be deemed unworthy of the attention of serious thinkers. It is provisional, no doubt; but I do not think it shallow. It can never give us a metaphysic of the universe; but the creators of such a metaphysic, when they come, will not find it stand in their way. Moreover, it takes account of facts as they are. A creed of some kind, religious or irreligious, is a vital necessity for all, not a speculative luxury for the few: and the practical creed of the few who speculate has a singular, and even suspicious, resemblance to that of the many who do not. While those rare individuals who have thought deeply about the theory of knowledge are profoundly divided as to _why_ we should believe, they largely agree as to _what_ we should believe with that vast multitude who, on the theory of knowledge, have never thought at all. Is not this a circumstance in itself most worthy of closer consideration? May it not guide us to some approximate solution of our present perplexities? The present lectures are an attempt to answer this question. Is my argument, then, nothing better than an appeal from the competent to the incompetent, from the few to the many? By no means. Progress, though of small account unless it touch the many, gets its vital impetus always from the few. It is to the patient labours of those rare intelligences who possess originality, courage, subtlety, and sympathy that we must look for the gradual working out of a theory of the universe which shall as fully satisfy our reason and our conscience as the limitations of our faculties permit. But that consummation is not yet. And since, whether we be philosophers or not, we all act on a working body of root-beliefs about men and things: since we are also in general agreement as to the form in which those beliefs can best express the present state of knowledge, is it not legitimate to ask whether, on the basis thus provided, a still larger measure of practical harmony cannot in the meantime be reasonably established? It is true that Theism could never by such methods acquire a certitude either greater than, or independent of, the beliefs of science and common sense. But, could it acquire as much, theologians might well be content, though philosophers most rightly strove for more. FOOTNOTES: [1] Written before the war. LECTURE II I