ABSTRACT
I HAVE arrived at the opening of this last chapter without having suggested any definite theory concerning the nature of things; and I shall finish this chapter without having presented any such theory. This book tries to serve a different and in a sense perhaps more ambitious purpose. Its aim is to re-equip men with the faculties which centuries of critical thought have taught them to distrust. The reader has been invited to use these faculties and contemplate thus a picture of things restored to their fairly obvious nature. This is all the book was meant to do. For once men have been made to realize the crippling mutilations imposed by an objectivist framework-once the veil of ambiguities covering up these mutilations has been definitively dissolved-many fresh minds will turn to the task of reinterpreting the world as it is, and as it then once more will be seen to be.
