Collected Essays and Reviews

MORE P R O B LEMS ! W H Y should we read them if they are not our problems, but only Mr. Lewes’s? Of all forms of earthly worry, the metaphysical worry seems the most gratuitous. If it lands us in permanently skeptical conclusions, it is worse than superfluous; and if (as is almost always the case with non-skeptical systems) it simply ends by “indorsing” common-sense, and reinstating us in the possession of our old feelings, motives, and duties, we may fairly ask if it was worth while to go so far round in order simply to return to our starting-point and be put back into the old harness. Is not the primal state of philosophic innocence, since the practical difference is nil, as good as the state of reflective enlightenment? And need we, provided we can stay at home and take the world for granted, undergo the fatigues of a campaign with such uncomfortable spirits as the present author, merely for the sake of coming to our own again, with nothing gained but the pride of having accompanied his expedition? So we may ask. But is the pride nothing? Consciousness is the only measure of utility, and even if no philosophy could ever alter a man’s motives in life, — which is untrue, — that it should add to their conscious completeness is enough to make thousands take upon themselves its burden of perplexities. We like the sense of companionship with better and more eager intelligences than our own, and that increment of self-respect which we all experience in passing from an instinctive to a reflective state, and adopting a belief which hitherto we simply underwent.