hypocritical method of a generation of weaklings. Truth must be provoked, I might almost say invented; and when it has been invented it must be made real and concrete through the dominion which the spirit must incessantly exercise over material things.
Such, in somewhat sharper emphasis, are the ideas which recur throughout the keen and imaginative writings of the Oxford philosopher. In Axioms as Postulates, which he published, together with essays by some of his friends, in the volume called Personal Idealism (1902), there appears an irreverent analysis of those truths which are traditionally called necessary, and an intimate history of axioms. Axioms, he shows, are but hypotheses which have proved so useful, and have succeeded so well in displacing all rival hypotheses, that today they seem indispensable: they are merely empiric propositions or teleological conventions which have proved victorious in the struggle for acceptance as truth.
In other words, the origin of those concepts which we tend to regard as the eternal armor of reason is purely practical and utilitarian. That which has proved most serviceable has asserted itself and has survived. Everything else has been thrown into the enormous waste-basket of the insignificant and the erroneous. Knowledge must serve life. Life, then, may suppress such knowledge as harms or does not help it.
