The opinionated introduction genre of philosophical writing knows no greater master than D.M. Armstrong. This little book is a tour a’eforce of the genre, offering a succinct presentation of a global metaphysical worldview — a grand system in the early-modern style. Longtime Armstrong readers (or even those who just read his l997 A World 0f States 0f Ajj”airs) will be familiar with most of the material here, but bringing all of it into a concisely articulated stable equilibrium is a major philosophical achievement, one which ought to serve well an increasingly balkanized discipline. The book reminds us that, as Sellars once put it, ‘the aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.’