907 097 PREFACE. A LIFE-LABOUR expended on thinkers of a special type, combined with a survey of all Literature from the standpoint of the same thought, might not unreasonably be expected to make discoveries and induce results of a peculiar kind. Without anticipating any a priori harmony or providential relation, so to speak, between the labour and its outcome, the philosophical thinker may feel no small gratification at observing how much greater and richer and how much more important his scheme of thought is than he had anticipated. Contemplating, for example, the history of skeptical free-thinkers as a department of philosophy in which less labour had been spent than it seemed to deserve, the author of the following pages was struck with the remarkable fact that just as the greatest thinkers have been of a skeptical kind, so all the dramas that have most impressed themselves on the minds of men have been dramas whose subjects and characters have pertained to skeptical freethought. In a word, all the greatest dramas and dramatic plots in all ages of the world have been of this class. Thus the greatest of Greek plays, the master-work of the greatest of Greek dramatists, is without doubt the "Prometheus Bound" of Aeschylus; the noblest of Bible-books, that is, with a dramatic plot and character, is unquestionably the Book of Job; the greatest play of England's, and of the world's, great dramatist has been the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare; and the noblest drama of the most famous of modern poets has been the "Faust" of Goethe; while the problem of the "Faust" has again been considered by Calderon from a more strictly Roman Catholic point of view in the most striking of all his dramas "El Magico Prodigioso". No dramas have attracted so much attention-each in its special environment of time and circumstance-as these five. None have been taken as manifesting so adequately the intellectual and spiritual idiosyncrasy of their 158442 writers--none have enjoyed so great a popularity as representing the character of the writer, as well as that of his nation, as each of these great plays has done. Now a brief reflection may serve to suggest that these dramas, starting from the same standpoint, and resembling each other's plot and evolution so closely, must needs possess matter of exceeding interest for all thinkers and schools of thought. First, they prove that the problems and difficulties with which men have coped through all time are essentially the same Prometheus in opposition to the Olympian Deities; the Patriarch Job in antagonism to the Hebrew Jahve; Faust and the Wonder-Working Magician contending with the Deity of the modern world and with the laws by which he endeavours to rule it-all are vindicators of the self-same issue —protagonists in the self-same battle. They occupy the same standpoint of inherent justice, and of automatic mental independence, of self-determining reason and conscience; they commence from the self-same starting-point; they employ largely the same arguments; they arrive mostly at the same conclusions. In a word, the contest is the same humanity set in array against the dread powers of the universe, which has engaged the attention of the noblest minds whose speculations are recorded in human history, a contest contemporaneous with the growth of reason, instinct with its life and attributes, and bound to endure as long as reason and humanity are destined to last-in other words, to the eternity of man and whatever is eternal and divine in his speculation and aspiration. A word of exception may perchance be thought needful for Hamlet as one of the five skeptical thinkers. In harmony with a nationality which, starting from that of its author and nation, is far more practical than speculative, his doubt is largely concerned with action. He recognises the compulsion in the laws of the universe and in human enactments. His hesitation and fear to act are based on the difficulties inherent |