32629 TERTIUM QUID: CHAPTERS ON VARIOUS DISPUTED QUESTIONS. BY EDMUND GURNEY, = LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., I PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 1887. PREFACE. NEARLY the whole of the contents of these volumes has appeared in well-known Reviews and Magazines in the course of the last few years, and is reprinted by the kind permission of the respective publishers. My title needs a word of apology. I had purposed to call the book simply Contemporary Essays; but I was warned that such a name would probably choke off even the small sale which was the most that I could hope for. So an alternative had to be devised; and the subjects treated being too various for any brief comprehensive description, the uniting idea had to be found, if at all, in the method of treatment. Now it happens that most of the papers deal with matters of contem porary controversy, as to which two antagonistic opinions have been strongly entertained and enforced, each with distinct and direct reference to the other. Thus, the Positivist view of life has had to reckon almost exclusively with the view of more or less orthodox Christianity; the aim of 'Natural Religion' has been simply to refute and supplant Supernaturalism; those who doubt whether life is 'worth living' have directed all their weapons against the fallacious confidence of the Materialistic school; Vivisectionist and Antivivisectionist have thrust and parried each as if his only possible critic or accuser were the other; 'evidence in matters extraordinary,' devoured or rejected en bloc, has been used as the gauge alike of popular credulity and of scientific arrogance. Or to turn to æsthetic subjects, the most conspicuous artistic creator of our time has been either worshipped as a prophet or decried as a charlatan; in Music, the issues between classical form and free romanticism, and between the absolute and the expressive, have been contested with none the less earnestness and conviction for being totally un |