Envoi

Summary

Henry Fielding provided the motto for this work and he shall provide its epitaph.

We are now, reader, arrived at the last stage of our long journey. As we have therefore travelled together through so many pages, let us behave to one another like fellow travellers, who have passed several days in the company of each other; and who, notwithstanding any bickerings or little animosities which may have occurred on the road, generally all make up at the last and mount, for the last time, into their vehicle with chearfulness and good humour.

(Tom Jones, Book 18, Preface)

Thoughts of journeys have a particular relevance to my project. Home, as a poet once platitudinously remarked, is where all journeys start from. But having started, journeys can take one of two forms (although mixtures of them are possible). There are journeys, of the kind made by the starship Enterprise, journeys that seek new worlds and, in the glorious split infinitive of the Star Trek manifesto, seek to boldly go where no one has gone before. Home, then, is left behind. But there is also the journey of self-discovery, undertaken not to find out new things about other things but in the hope of coming to self-knowledge. Those modes of journeying correspond to two conceptions of philosophy. The first corresponds to Russell's influential view of philosophy as the most general empirical science, a view according to which our philosophical problems are to be solved by finding out new things about other things.