Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/48

sense of disgrace and rebellion, “bitterly asbamed,” as a friend of mine has expressed the same feeling in my hearing, “bitterly ashamed to find myself living in a universe whose truth could possibly be made so inefficacious and uninteresting.” To be sure, in saying all this I am far from desiring to make technical metaphysics easy, for the study is a laborious one; and there are many topics in logic, in the theory of the sciences, and in ethics, to whose comprehension there is no royal road. But then, once your eyes opened, and you will indeed find subjects that at first seemed dry and inhuman full of life and even of passion; as, for instance, few sciences are in their elementary truths more enticing to the initiated, more coy and baffling to the reflective philosophical student, in fact, more romantic, than is the Differential Calculus. But if such matters lie far beyond our present field, I mention them only to show that even the hardest and least popular reflective researches are to be justified, in the long run, by their bearings upon life.