54 SHADWOETH H. HODGSON. on these points now. The point I wish to insist 011 is, what hope or what means there may be of revivifying philo- sophy, one and indivisible, as distinguished from the mush- room crop of philosophies, the various systems of philosophy which men are making, each for himself, out of the principle or set of principles which may happen to commend itself to him as self-evident, either from his own reflection, or on the authority of some leader of thought who has chanced to command his attention. I take it that the great philosophical problem of the pre- sent day is this, to put philosophy on the basis of a definite pursuit, having a field common to all workers, like one of the sciences, so that each worker shall add something to the common stock of knowledge, whether it be by perception of new truth or by correction of old error, without proceeding to construct afresh the whole previous acquisition on some new and comprehensive principle evident in the first instance to himself alone. It is to make philosophy more than the philosopher, just as science is more than the man of science. For this purpose there must be a method common to all workers, common, not to contemporaries only, but also to predecessors and successors, a method which each may apply to the phenomena of his own experience or con- sciousness, though not of course by simple interrogation of it without knowledge of previous speculations. The most careful study of what has been already acquired, and of the ways which others have trodden, will still be as requisite as ever. But in addition to this, there must be the common method also. The imperatively pressing nature of this purpose of refor- mation stands out clearly from the history of philosophy, and more particularly from its history since Kant. The great lesson to be learnt from this later history is the futility of constructing a theory of the universe on any principle of causal agency, however apparently certain, be- fore making an exact analysis of the phenomena which fall actually under observation, and especially before we know from that analysis, what precisely the term causation means. The principle of causation was the traditional assumption which Kant adopted from Scholasticism, and transmitted to his successors, and this it is which has ruined and is ruining, from within, so many of these theories. They have assumed the general conception of causal agency as equivalent to a knowledge of what causal agency consisted in, or of the per- ceptual content of that general conception. It is a case of a general term being taken for an actual or real thing, a too
