Author: Ernest Belfort Bax

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-25

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 9781330162439

Excerpt from The Real the Rational and the Alogical: Being Suggestions for a Philosophical Reconstruction In the years that have elapsed since The Roots of Reality was first thought out and written down, the currents of philosophical opinion in English-speaking countries and elsewhere have considerably shifted their ground. The old Hegelian positions which dominated English speculative thought during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and were still powerful in the opening years of the present, have been deserted by the exponents of up-to-date philosophic thought. They arc no longer fashionable. Hence the amount of space in this book devoted to the refutation of the main Hegelian position - which I have called "Pallogism" but which it is fashionable now to term "Intellectualism" and which constitutes the basis of the Hegelian philosophy, namely, the assumption of the intellectual concept as the sole ultimate principle of Reality - may be regarded as excessive and the argument itself as unnecessarily laboured. I have nevertheless left the portions dealing with "Pallogism" mainly intact. The position itself has played too great a part in the history of speculative thought, from Plato downward, to be treated as though it were affected by the mere passing philosophical fashions of the hour. Perhaps the two most noteworthy recent portents in the early twentieth-century philosophical world are "Bergsonism" and "Pragmatism." These two doctrines, so fashionable within the last few years, have, in the present work, received fuller consideration. At the time, indeed, when The Roots of Reality was published, the ideas of M. Bergson were hardly known in England. There is much in M. Bergson's speculations that harmonises with the principles set forth in these pages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.