SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. 365 



basis of both. Here we meet that hoary sinner, the 'uncaused cause/ 

 about which, to our modern amazement, the science and philosophy of 

 that day are agreed entirely. 



Passing to England, we find Locke confronted by a different prob- 

 lem, but the setting remains identical. Assuming, like Newton and 

 Descartes, two separate factors — others assumed many, but the number 

 makes no essential difEerence — and asking. How do I, who am inside, 

 get my knowledge of things, which are outside? Under the circum- 

 stances, the obvious reply is, through the senses. The senses write 

 upon the mind. Unfortunately, this information about the external 

 world lacks directness, for the senses are modifications of the bodily 

 organism and therefore tell nothing about the real objects. How, then, 

 placed in such a dilemma, do we know objects ? Locke alleges that Sub- 

 stance, a thing which we do not perceive, but which we are compelled to 

 infer, originates the conviction of permanence associated with reality 

 in objects. Here, once more, a third thing, belonging to neither of the 

 factors under review, plays the part of Newton's agent and of the 

 Cartesian deity. Without condescending upon further details, it is easy 

 to see why science and philosophy could not well fall out during the 

 period when such conceptions held sway. But this agreement, happy 

 in its unconsciousness of problems at all events, was not to endure 

 forever. The world of human experience revealed new aspects, and 

 fresh questions, sources of dire controversy, loomed upon the horizon. 

 The dynamic, molecular and organic modes of thought, with their 

 attendant conception of the universe, were destined to elbow out the 

 static and mechanical. 



Even amid many seeming transformations, the 'Newtonian phi- 

 losophy^ preserved itself unchanged in essentials. The Deistic move- 

 ment, Butler's 'Analogy,' Pope's 'Essay on Man' and Paley's 'Natural 

 Theology,' and the highly wrought productions of the great French 

 physicists, culminating in Laplace's 'Mecanique Celeste,' even the 

 Scottish 'common-sense' protest against current scepticism, all emerged 

 on the basis of its first principles. But, after the middle of the eight- 

 eenth century, three men shook it to its foundations and made pos- 

 sible the new structure we now call 'modem' thought. These men 

 were Hume, Kant and Herder; the half-conscious protest of Spinoza 

 had passed over the heads of his contemporaries unheeded. Was he 

 not a Jew, a pantheist and, therefore, a flat blasphemer? The joint per- 

 formance of this eighteenth century trinity, 'equal in power and glory,' 

 raises problems of the most complicated kind, so complicated, indeed, 

 that they have been the bugbear even of expert students during the 

 last two generations. I can attempt here to put the salient points 

 only, as clearly as possible. 



Many pious efforts to understand Hume have been frustrated by 



