Pure philosophy is no longer unfashionable. In the last few years, scientists of repute have impressed the general reader with its capital importance. The brilliant expositions of contemporary science by Sir A. S. Eddington and Sir James Jeans mount to a philosophical enquiry. They make it quite clear that physical science as such cannot arrive at the nature of things.

The Cambridge University Press has now given us an account, in a small volume the size of The Mysterious Universe, of a voyage into metaphysics launched in the true spirit of Plato, St. Thomas, Spinoza and the pure philosophers of the past. It does not set out to discover and provide a popular map of reality. But when philosophy has been too often confused with so much that is inferior, it is agreeable to read of ‘a resolute direction of thought to the problem of Being’; of an effort to attain truth through Ideas and not images; of a search for causes that are at the same time reasons.