There can be little doubt, I think, that the quality and texture of recent scientific and philosophical thought mark a greater break with the past than any innovations such as were introduced by a Gallileo or a Newton, a Descartes or a Kant. The switch over from the logicality and essential rationality of these men to the irrationalisms, the anti-intellectualisms, and the new logics of the moderns, is not at all on the same footing as that deepening of our concepts (...) of knowledge and reality which we associate with the masters of thought, more particularly with the critical philosophy of Kant. Strong and significant as these earlier changes were, they marked but the onward strides of an art of thinking which remained in its essence the same in spite of them. But the thinkers in the public eye to-day are exploring in unknown regions, and it may turn out that they have got beyond their depth. Whatever their fate, it seems undeniable that the experiments that they have made and are making constitute, at points at least, and for the time being, a veritable revolution. (shrink)

The term metaphysics was formed at a time when physics and the physical categories constituted the whole of natural science and to describe the field of thought beyond physics. With the development of other fields of knowledge such as the biological and the historical, it has of necessity acquired a much broader meaning. It describes a field of speculative thought which lies beyond the categories of any of these sciences. In the present context the metaphysical is the meta-historical.

Is metaphysics possible? From the beginning of our present sophisticated era we have continually been compelled to ask this question. For myself I confess to a growing impatience with this and like questions. I hold with Kant that metaphysics is a Naturanlage, that should all science pass away and should we revert to barbarism, there would still be metaphysics. I am also disposed to think that should mankind develop in the opposite direction, should we become the supermen or the angels (...) which the perfectionists of all times have envisaged, metaphysics would not only remain, but metaphysical insight would be the very life of that perfection. As Dante said, “metaphysics is the bread of angels.”. (shrink)