176 PHILOSOPHY 



the favorite name of the Unity of Nature, is the pet dogma of modern 

 science; or, rather, to speak with right accuracy, it is the stock-in- 

 trade of a philosophy of science, current among many of the leaders 

 of modern science; for every such assertion, covering, as it tacitly 

 and unavoidably does, a view about the absolute whole, is an asser- 

 tion belonging to the province of philosophy, before whose tribunal 

 it must come for the assessment of its value. The presuppositions 

 of all the special sciences, and, above all, this presupposition of the 

 Unity and Uniformity of Nature, common to all of them, must thus 

 come back for justification and requisite definition to philosophy 

 that uppermost and all-inclusive form of cognition which addresses 

 itself to the whole as whole. In their common assertion of the Unity 

 of Nature, the exponents of modern science come unawares out of 

 their own province into quite another and a higher; and in doing so 

 they show how unawares they come, by presenting in most instances 

 the curious spectacle of proclaiming at once their increasing belief 

 in the unity of things, and their increasing disbelief in its pene- 

 trability by our intelligence : 



In's Inner e der Natur, 

 Dringt kein erschaffner Geist, 



is their chosen poet's expression of their philosophic mood. Curious 

 we have the right to call this state of the scientific mind, because 

 it is to critical reflection so certainly self-contradictory. How can 

 there be a real unity belonging to what is inscrutable? - - what evi- 

 dence of unity can there be, except in intelligible and explanatory 

 continuity? 



But, at all events, this very mood of agnostic self-contradiction, 

 into which the development of the sciences casts such a multitude 

 of minds, brings them, - - brings all of us, as already indicated, 

 into that court of philosophy where alone such issues lawfully belong, 

 and where alone they can be adjudicated. If the unification of the 

 sciences can be made out to be real by making out its sole sufficient 

 condition, namely, that there is a genuine, and not a merely nominal, 

 unity in the whole of reality itself, - - a unity that explains because 

 it is itself, not simply intelligible, but the only completely intelligible 

 of things, --this desirable result must be the work of philosophy. 

 However difficult the task may be, it is rightly put upon us who belong 

 to the Department listed first among the twenty-four in the pro- 

 gramme of this representative Congress. 



I cannot but express my own satisfaction, as a member of this 

 Department, nor fail to extend my congratulations to you who are 

 my colleagues in it, that the Congress, in its programme, takes 

 openly the affirmative on this question of the possible unification of 

 knowledge. The Congress has thus declared beforehand for the 



