THE UNITY OF SCIENCE. 



525 



makes when, after having studied all the sciences, he realizes that 

 no one can attain knowledge without plunging into the reality of 

 life. Yet we do not believe that philosophy has forfeited the glory 

 that is due to every sincere effort, in whatever order of research. 

 It was necessary, indispensable, and certain, that reason, escaping 

 the limits of things, should exhaust itself in tentatives. Did not 

 Plato of necessity create Aristotle, and stoicism Lucretius, in the 

 same way that Bacon and Descartes, Galileo and Kant, were born 

 of scholastic and dogmatic thought ? 



Philosophy (I am not speaking of speculative philosophy this 

 time) now comprehends that it can aspire to fill only two mis- 

 sions : to be the synthesis of all our knowledge, and to generalize 

 the method which ascends from facts to ideas, persuaded that the 

 idea springs from the fact and does not create it. In this sense 

 philosophy, suffering modifications as time goes on, will be always 

 the synthesis of the known (not of the knowable), and, freed from 

 that which is of speculation and ideology, will remain the guard- 

 ian mistress of the harmony in which the true, the beautiful, and 

 the good are to be blended. 



Thus there remains a task for philosophy that peculiarly be- 

 longs to it — one of the noblest tasks — to examine the solidity of 

 the bases of morals, independently of customs and the prejudices 

 of individual nations and times ; and ethics is not separable from 

 aesthetics. So understood, philosophy is the science of sciences, 

 or absolutely the science, the guarantee of progress, the guardian 

 of morals, the mediator between science and art, the supreme ex- 

 pression of liberty of thought which admits neither innate ideas 

 nor revelation. We comprehend everything under the segis of 

 such a philosophy, precisely because method has become single. 



The long-cherished contrast between the positive and histori- 

 cal sciences has disappeared, for we are persuaded that the point 

 of departure in this also is observation, that the continuity of 

 facts must be followed step by step in seeking out the law, in 

 tracing the concatenation, in order to rise to the conception that 

 all has become what it was necessary for it to become. Harmony 

 in the universe is inherent to the beginning of things ; and if we 

 could embrace them in a single glance we should see that first 

 causes correspond with final causes ; and teleology and causality 

 would be merely the two faces of the same medal. 



Unity of method conduces to the union of the exact sciences 

 and of historical investigations, of jurisprudence and anthropolo- 

 gy, of biology and military art, of politics and statistics. From 

 this marriage have been born the social sciences, which have come 

 to demonstrate that society has its evolution, its exigencies, its 

 diseases, and, in short, its laws like the individual, and that it is 

 necessary to calculate facts and observe their march in order to 



