There are a great many well-minded people who entertain the opinion that the metaphysical is the unintelligible; that it is an intangible, up-in-the-air kind of thinking about things, of which some normal and many abnormal people are greatly enamored, and that it has very little to do with practical affairs. Not infrequently one meets with those who explain their lack of interest in Christian Science by the statement that it is altogether too metaphysical for matter-of-fact, unlettered folk, and that they are compelled to content themselves with something they can more readily understand. Like many another misjudgment, this is entirely due to misapprehension, as all will realize when they devote a little attention to definitions.
The Greek term "metaphysical" was originally used, as the lexicographers tell us, by the editors of Aristotle to designate that part of his writings which followed his Physics. After considering material phenomena, the world of effects, he took a further step in his inquiry and essayed to enter the realm of cause, and in this Aristotle was following the lead of his great teachers, Socrates and Plato, who take preeminent rank among the early non-Christian inquirers into the nature of being. Something of the greatness of these men inheres in the fact that they were thus responsive to that fundamental impulsion of thought which is known as the law of the sufficient reason. There may be crude mentalities which are quite contented with effects, but most men, even though uncultured, are impelled to find if possible an explanation of effects; and the answers to these inquiries into the nature of being have given distinctive form to the philosophies and religions of the world.
Although the great Greek thinkers may have known little or nothing of the Hebrew prophets and literature, and though they antedated the coming of the Nazarene more than three centuries, nevertheless they gave expression to that same instinct which under divine guidance and illumination gave character to the appeal of the prophets and leaders of the so-called chosen race, all of whom were metaphysicians in so far as they meditated upon the problem of causation and declared for omnipotent, omnipresent Spirit, as the explanation and support of all being. Thus Job, whose skepticism was out measured only by his faith, Abraham, Moses, Isaac, Daniel, and all the rest of them, laid the profoundest emphasis upon questions and facts with which physics has nothing whatever to do. So, too, was Christ Jesus peculiarly great as a metaphysician, as a teacher respecting questions and things which lie wholly without the domain of the material.
