Riddles of the Sphinx. A Study in the Philosophy of Evolution. By A Troglodyte. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. 1891.

xxvii[i], 468 pp; some light foxing to preliminary and final leaves; with review of F.H. Bradley's 'Collected Essays' dated 1935, to rear pastedown. Original cloth, heavily faded on spine, gilt sphinx to upper cover, a little frayed at top of spine, and partly split at top of front joint. First edition. Scarce. Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864-1937) was the foremost proponent of pragmatism at the turn of the century; he and William James corresponded until James' death in 1910. As is the case with the other pragmatists of his time, such as Dewey, understanding Schiller's logic properly requires embedding it in a broader philosophical project. Schiller was an iconoclast and followed the way of pragmatism to one extreme, which he called 'humanism' - the core of which can be unearthed in his first book, 'Riddles of the Sphinx', published pseudonymously. Schiller's humanism was philosophically radical in that it rendered the study of any form of thought essentially anthropological. The self, according to Schiller, comes not just with the ability to reason logically but also with the capacity to develop, change, imagine, feel, dream, desire, control, deliberate, imagine, choose, co-operate, invent, force, joke, die, deceive, act, and much more, all of which are connected, all of which have grown and developed through evolution, and from the particular chains of experiences a self has undergone since its birth within a specific historical culture. …