PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 217 



experience. They, therefore, have essential and permanent relations 

 of dependence for material, for inspiration and correction, and for 

 other forms of helpfulness. While, then, their respective spheres have 

 been more clearly delimited during the last century, their inter- 

 dependence has been more forcefully exhibited. Both of them have 

 been developing a systematic exposition of the universe. Both 

 of them desire to enlarge and deepen the conception of the Being of 

 the World, as made known to the totality of human experience, in 

 its Unity of nature and significance. We cannot believe that the end 

 of the nineteenth century would sustain the charge which Fontenelle 

 made in the closing years of the seventeenth century: " L' Academic 

 des Sciences ne prcnd la nature que par petites parcelles." Science itself 

 now bids us regard the Universe as a dynamical Unity, teleologically 

 conceived, because in a process of evolution under the control of 

 immanent ideas. Philosophy assumes the same point of view, rather 

 at the beginning than at the end of defining its purpose; and so feels 

 a certain glad leap at its heart-strings, and an impulse to hold out 

 the hand to science, when it hears such an utterance as that of Poin- 

 care: Ce n'est pas le mechanisme le vrai, le seul but ; c'est I'unite. 



Shall we not say, then, that this double-faced but wholly true 

 lesson has been learned: namely, that the so-called philosophy of 

 nature has no sound foundation and no safeguard against vagaries 

 of every sort, unless it follows the lead of the positive sciences of 

 nature; but that the sciences themselves can never afford a full 

 satisfaction to the legitimate aspirations of human reason unless- they, 

 too, contribute to the philosophy of nature - - writ large and con- 

 ceived of as a real-ideal Unity. 



That nature, as known and knowable by man, is a great artist, 

 and that man's sesthetical consciousness may be trusted as having 

 a certain ontological value, is the postulate properly derived from the 

 considerations advanced in the latest, and in some respects the most 

 satisfactory, of the three Critiques of Kant. The ideal way of looking 

 at natural phenomena \vhich so delighted the mind of Goethe has now 

 been placed on broad and sound foundations by the fruitful indus- 

 tries of many workmen, such as Karl Ernst von Baer and Charles 

 Darwin, - - whose morphological and evolutionary conceptions of the 

 universe have transformed the current conceptions of cosmic pro- 

 cesses. But the world of physical and natural phenomena has thereby 

 been rendered not less, but more, of a Cosmos, an orderly totality. 



In addition to these more general but somewhat vague evaluations 

 of the progress of philosophy during the nineteenth century, we are 

 certainly called upon to face the question whether, after all, any 

 advance has been made toward the more satisfactory solution of the 

 definite problems which the Kantian criticism left unsolved. To this 

 question I believe an affirmative answer may be given in accordance 



