provide a common school of debate which rivals schools
of the ancient and medieval worlds. Accordingly I
have heavy obligations to acknowledge to Bertrand
Russell, Wildon Carr, F. C. Schiller, T. P. Nunn,
Dawes Hicks, McTaggart, James Ward, and many
others who, amid their divergencies of opinion, are
united in the candid zeal of their quest for truth.

It is quite unnecessary to draw attention to the in-
completeness of this investigation. The book is merely
an enquiry. It raises more difficulties than those which
it professes to settle. This is inevitable in any philo-
sophical work, however complete. All that one can
hope to do is to settle the right sort of difficulties and to
raise the right sort of ulterior questions, and thus to
accomplish one short step further into the unfathomable
mystery.

Memories are short, and perhaps it is not inapt to
put on record circumstances common to the life of all
England during years of war. The book is the product
of intervals of leisure amid pressing occupation, a refuge
from immediate fact. It has been thought out and
written amid the sound of guns--guns of Kitchener's
army training on Salisbury Plain, guns on the Somme
faintly echoing across the Sussex coast: some few parts
composed to pass times of expectation during air-raids
over London, punctuated by the sound of bombs and
the answer of artillery, with argument clipped by the
whirr of aeroplanes. And through the land anxiety, and
at last the anguish which is the price of victory.

A. N. W.

April 20, 1919

-viii-