METAPHYSICS
The term “Metaphysics” has acquired a colloquial meaning that will mislead us unless we are on our guard. It is commonly used to mean such theories as have to do with the mysterious or occult. There is a certain justification for this usage, in that metaphysics is speculative rather than strictly experimental, and in that it takes us beyond the first appearances of things. But this is a question of method, and not of doctrine. To be a metaphysician one must push one’s thinking to the uttermost boundaries, and one must not rest satisfied with any first appearances, or any common-sense or conventional conclusions. But there is no unnecessary connection whatever between metaphysics and the doctrine that reality is mysterious or transcendent or supernatural or anything of the kind. It is entirely possible that metaphysics should in the end conclude that things are precisely what they seem, or that nature and nature alone is real. Metaphysics is simply an attempt to get to the bottom of things, and ascertain if possible what is the fundamental constitution of reality, and what its first and last causes. There are two leading alternatives: the theory that justifies the belief in God; the theory that discredits it, reducing it to a work of the imagination, an act of sheer faith, of an ecclesiastical fiction. The classic example of the latter type of metaphysics, ordinarily known as Materialism, is to be found in Hobbes. An excellent example of the former is to be found in the writings of Bishop Berkeley.〖H. C., xxxvii, 189.〗 As Hobbes sought to show that the only substance is body, so Berkeley sought to show that the only substance is spirit. The nature of spirit, according to Berkeley, is first and directly known in that knowledge which each man has of himself. Then, in order to account for the independent and excellent order of nature, one must suppose a universal or divine spirit that causes and sustains it, a spirit that is like ourselves in kind, but infinite in power and goodness.