The present work is intended once again to draw the attention of readers to the resources opened up by Spinoza for the elucidation of the classical problems of philosophy. Today these problems are too often taken to be merely verbal, so that answers to them so far as these are metaphysical are confidently claimed to be "nonsense. " My labours will, therefore, seem to minds thus committed to have been untimely and funda- mentally futile. Untimely they may have been, but unless also fu- tile their untimeliness may render them the more exigent; and to judge them as futile is to claim a certainty not avaIlable to the honest sceptic. Vigorous attempts to discredit metaphysical investigation are no new thing, though the latest is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing, and cer- tainly the most self-confident. Yet it may well be argued that effective criticism of metaphysics is either itself a sort of metaphysics, or has for its foundation presuppositions that could only be metaphysically es- tablished. "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recu"et." Metaphysics survives, and can only survive as a true philosophia perennis, as the catalyst of scepsis and schism - neither as inexorable dogma "once for all de- livered," nor as "a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth, without a formal seed.
