struggling in a kind of agony that gives a note to the entire literature of our period.
To turn from history and economics to professional philosophy is only to find the same lesson repeated. Outside the synthetic system of Mr. Herbert Spencer—that colossal edifice slowly and painfully (and surely to its own detriment) constructed by the author apart from and almost independent of the professional learning of the schools—the exponents of philosophy in England live in an old world of thought which has scarcely been affected by the influx of knowledge which the advancement of the lower sciences has brought. They are even, for the most part, unconscious of what is being done outside this world. There is no more striking sight in our time, when the perception of the unity and continuity of natural law throughout the entire realm of life has become the starting point of all real work, than to find men, authorities in their own departments of knowledge, endeavoring to discuss the problems of human existence and to formulate the ultimate principles of human nature without any real equipment for such a task, possessing scarcely any knowledge of those sciences which lead up to their subject, and almost without any perception of the immense and even revolutionary importance of the contributions which these sciences have made to that subject within the lifetime of the present generation. Even in the least fruitful period in the past this position would have been disastrous. For there is no lesson in the history of philosophy clearer and more emphatic than one which cannot be expressed in any better words than Professor Huxley’s, viz., “The men who have made the most important positive additions to philosophy, such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, not to mention more recent examples, have been deeply imbued with the spirit of physical science; and in some cases, such as those of Descartes and Kant, have been largely acquainted with its details. In truth, the laboratory is the fore-court of the temple of philosophy; and whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification there, has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.” And if this has been true in the past of those sciences upon which philosophy rests, how much more so in our own day, when these sciences have become the sources of knowledge that has transformed and reconstructed the very foundations of human thought![1]
- ↑ Nineteenth Century, February 1895.
