were produced and are published because the writer knows no English moral philosophy which does not, rightly or wrongly, seem to him to be at least as one-sided and even more dogmatic. Whatever they may be, if they bring any fresh element to the chaos of our philosophical literature they will be of use to the student.
But the ideas brought forward in these pages are not new. The source of every argument might in most cases have been given, and the reader referred to the works of one or two great men; and it is because the substance of the whole is not original that the writer has made scarcely any acknowledgments in detail. He has come forward not because what he has to say is new, but because our literature compels the belief that to the larger part of our philosophical public, and even of our philosophers, a great deal of it must be both novel and necessary.
This must be his excuse if the polemical part of his work (and too much is polemical) appears anywhere wanting in respect towards authors of repute and merit. But he thinks that he has nowhere overstepped the fair limits of controversy, a controversy into which he never would have ventured, were it not too much the fashion to take no account of views which are now more than half a century old, and the neglect of which he is convinced has done much to preclude the possibility of a solution.
