Now, the attempt to clear away this vagueness by the systematic
analysis of such concepts--in other words, the attempt to make a
thorough analysis of our experience--is metaphysics. The metaphysician
strives to limit his task as well as he may, and to avoid unnecessary
excursions into the fields occupied by the special sciences, even those
which lie nearest to his own, such as psychology and ethics. There is
a sense in which he may be said to be working in the field of a special
science, though he is using as the material for his investigations
concepts which are employed in many sciences; but it is clear that his
discipline is not a special science in the same sense in which geometry
and physics are special sciences.

Nevertheless, the special sciences stand, as we have already seen in
the case of several of them, very near to his own. If he broadens his
view, and deliberately determines to take a survey of the field of
human knowledge as illuminated by the analyses that he has made, he
becomes something more than a _metaphysician_; he becomes a
_philosopher_.

This does not in the least mean that he becomes a storehouse of
miscellaneous information, and an authority on all the sciences.
Sometimes the philosophers have attempted to describe the world of
matter and of mind as though they possessed some mysterious power of
knowing things that absolved them from the duty of traveling the weary
road of observation and experiment that has ended in the sciences as we
have them. When they have done this, they have mistaken the
significance of their calling. A philosopher has no more right than
another man to create information out of nothing.

But it is possible, even for one who is not acquainted with the whole