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Presidential Address -
and the existence of God, thus challenged. Luckily for the cause of Philosophy Green stemmed the tide of Naturalisim. However much one may criticise the Neo-Hegelianism of Green and his followers, Philo. sophy oweş an incalulable debt of gratitude to this great school of British Idealism. Just as the mechanical concept of the eighteenth century was superseded by the biological concept of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, so was the biological replaced by the spiritual concept of the fourth. Thus, matter, life and spirit are the three ruling ideas which mark successive stages in the history of philosophical thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, more especially in France and Britain. During the period of the eclipse which overtook Philosophy in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it was reduced to the position of General Science, or the Logic of Science, or a hierarchical classification of the particular sciences, and it was peremptorily advised 'not to speculate on origins and final ends, but to accept the actual and reduce all disordered and chaotic life and knowledge to orderly arrangement. As Comte maintained, the age of Theology had been followed by that of Metaphysics, and now the age of Metaphysics was to be superseded by that of Science.
II But all this has changed. The old problems of Philosophy which divided thinkers into realists and idealists, theists, atheists, free-willists and determinists have come to new life, in this age, with just this difference that Philosophy and Science are not regarded as watertight compartments, but are permitted to
