And now observe that exactly the same thing is reproduced in what we call modern philosophy. Starting from Bacon onwards, we have a series of systems which, in whatever fashion, attempt to decide what matter is, what are the qualities of matter a great series of natural and physical philosophers, who, sometimes dogmatically, and sometimes sceptically, resolve the insistent questions always pressing upon the human spirit. And then come men like Berkeley and Hume in England, and Kant in Germany, who propose a different question. The English philosophers, in their way, started the same kind of speculation which the philosopher of konigsberg attempted to answer, but neither Hume nor Berkeley realised the importance of the standpoint they were inaugurating, nor did they see quite clearly the nature of the problem whose solution they desired. It was Kant who first laid it down in his Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic, that what we must first determine is the conditions and limitations under which knowledge is possible at all. And this is why his own analogy with the work of the reformer of astronomy is absolutely correct. In earlier times the assump tion was that the earth lay at rest in the centre of the uni verse, and that the sun and the stars were the satellites, the appanages, of the abode of man. Suddenly the point of view is changed; the earth is not at rest, but is revolving round the central sun. If we desire to get to the centre of our universe, we shall find it in that object in relation to which every satellite is at once attracted and repelled, held in its elliptical course by centripetal and centrifugal forces. A similar revolution occurs in philosophy. We change the point of View. Instead of attempting to determine the characteristics of the kosmos, we start with the con ditions of our own human knowledge. We erect, as it were, our observatories not in the world, but within our selves-under the assurance that it is human thought which is the measure of the universe, not the universe which is the explanation and parent of thought. Such, at least, is the standpoint of Kant; the antithesis, as you will observe, of the scientific attitude, representing a revolution which may or may not be of ultimate value, but at all events possessing a peculiar significance and importance of its own, and giving, once for all, a basis for such logic and such ethics as can be held to correspond with the powers of the human, or, perhaps, even the divine, spirit.

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