ABSTRACT
The metaphysics is the intellectual attempt to understand the universe. It is as a standardized man that the empirical metaphysician postulates the intrinsic reality of the world of sense-experience. The standardized man is a rough-and-ready thinker, and he works up his primary assumptions by crude but direct methods into rough-and-ready systems of thought, which he may or may not hand over to the intellectual expert for further elaboration. These systems fall for the most part under three heads: supernaturalism, materialism, agnosticism. The supernaturalism raises the level of man's life, though at a heavy cost, for legalism, ceremonialism, superstition and priestcraft have ever been its satellites. A reaction against materialism, a sentimental reaction against its pessimism, an intellectual reaction against its dogmatism has led many metaphysically minded thinkers to take refuge in agnosticism. The agnostic's faith in the capacity of intellect is unbounded; so much so, indeed, that he instinctively takes for granted that what intellect cannot know cannot be known.
