ABSTRACT
The great metaphysical philosophers were about as far from being mentally defective as any men who ever lived; and it is not at all easy to see on first inspection why men of such exceptional intellectual prowess should have persisted as people did, generation after generation, in a quest which seems to many of us to-day as inherently hopeless as the attempt to reach the rainbow's end. The whole development of the intellectual thought has been moulded by the influence of the ancient Greeks, just as the religious thinking has been by that of the ancient Jews. The axioms used in Greek geometry are not self-contradictory, and people accordingly define a certain kind of space. The metaphysician wishes to arrive at some reliable conclusion about the 'nature of Reality', or 'God', or the 'Soul', or some such words.
