ABSTRACT
With the writing of the Preface to this book the office of the editor might have ended and I might have been content for the rest to leave the proper dramatis personæ to speak for themselves. My only excuse for adding to it a separate article on my own account, or indeed for appearing in any capacity in such a company, is that I happen to be one of the few now surviving whose life, as a student of philosophy, has on the whole coincided with the great movement of thought in our own country of which the writers in this book are the chief representatives, and which I may be said not only to have “contemplated,” but “enjoyed.” This gives me the advantage of being able to speak at first hand of the sources of the movement, and tempts, if it does not qualify me, to try to give some estimate both of its achievements and its limitations in so far as it may be taken as one continuous whole.
