ABSTRACT
89 After some twenty years during which one’s main intellectual concern has been the study and teaching of Philosophy, one should have thought that one would have worked out a fairly complete and well-rounded system of Philosophical beliefs. When I take stock of my philosophical knowledge, I find that I have nothing like a complete and systematic Philosophy to offer, but instead only a few disconnected and disjointed bits of doctrine, which perhaps can hardly be strung together into a common fabric, and which in any case will leave large gaps and openings through which the cold blast of doubt, and the frost of scepticism, can easily penetrate my philosophic soul. This lack of anything like a philosophical system is not the outcome of mere indolence of spirit and temperamental inaptitude, but is largely the outcome of the course of philosophical study and training I have undergone, and the general trend in which philosophical doctrines themselves have tended to move during the last twenty years that I have been interested in them. But more than anything else it is the experience of my own life and of the world in which my daily lot has been cast, which has helped to shape and mould my attitude on general philosophical problems.
