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 |