To ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD, LITT.D., LL.D., Principal of Owens College, Manchester, MY DEAR WARD, If the following pages contain anything helpful towards the solution of the problems which I discuss, it is largely due to the rasters of Teutonic thought cited by me from time to time. It has been their mission to reassert, in the language proper to the age, the idea of perfection as an inward condition of mind and spirit: to maintain the truth, which underlies all rational philosophy, that the great mechanism of the world exists for something beyond itself: that it exists for the realization of moral worth-worth in character and in conduct. Kant and Hegel, Trendelenburg and Lotze, furnish an antidote to the dissolvent doctrine of sensualistic individualism, by which the French intellect seems hopelessly poisoned, and which has disastrously affected many an excellent understanding among ourselves. They, more than any other modern writers, have vindicated the conception of human society as organic and ethical. I directly owe it that To you vi I have learnt of these teachers. When, in my undergraduate days at Peterhouse, I enjoyed the advantage of your instruction as Classical Lecturer of the College and as my Private Tutor, you did much more than direct my Academical reading with sagacious judgment, and supplement it with wide and accurate knowledge. Your precept and example sent me to the study of the language and literature of Germany, in which you alone, I think, of my Cambridge friends, were deeply versed. The debt of gratitude thus laid upon me I have never forgotten, and have long wished to record. You greatly add to it by your kindness in allowing me to write here a Hame so highly and so justly honoured by all students of English literature and of scientific history. SUMMARY. The reason why this is so is to be found in the domina- tion of the Many. The vast majority of men are swayed by rhetoric rather than by logic; and, in some cases, an apt phrase becomes a Shibboleth, the The object of the present work is to examine seven Shib- boleths which largely dominate contemporary life. The word is employed very vaguely. Those who use it most carefully and conscientiously intend to signify by it the ascent of mankind from bad to good and from good to better: the advancement of our race But these are question-begging generalities, underlain by PAGE and would be denied by the overwhelming majority of mankind; and the general concept of humanity em- ployed in the current phrases about Progress is fairly The progressive races are a small minority of the human tribes peopling the globe; and what we generally Wherein does this Progress consist? Two thousand years ago Sophocles struck the true note of it in the noble choric song which celebrates the might, The item of it which most strikes the imagination is the In this sphere our Progress is absolute. But, more, the spirit in which the physicist works has vastly con- But great as is our gain, direct and indirect, from the But the physical sciences themselves supply abundant evidence against the exclusive claims made, under the name of Progress, for their methods. The very mental processes without which they could not More than this, they also furnish us with a refutation And, as a matter of fact, the writings of the most eminent masters of physics supply evidence how futile is their attempt to rest in Naturalism; how irre- But these high thoughts are the prerogative of the pro- founder intellects among the masters and students of physics. It is unquestionable that one result of the stupendous advance of the natural sciences, in our own day, has been to diffuse a vulgar and debased Materialism. The popular notion of Progress is certainly utilitarian, holding it to consist in the |