OF SOCIETY. 433 



ideas," which was indeed significantly termed a mental 

 chemistry. It is not necessary to labour this point any 

 further. The reader will, from a perusal of earlier 

 portions of this history, recollect many other instances 

 in which scientific progress or philosophical thought was 

 stimulated into increased activity by the discovery and 

 description of phenomena or features which could be 

 clearly defined, which allowed themselves to be examined 

 in their isolation from a large surrounding mass of con- 

 fusing detail. The enormous labour and ingenuity 

 which have been spent over producing pure substances 

 in chemistry or analysing with the microscope com- 

 plicated tissues into their component parts are repre- 

 sentative of this atomising tendency of scientific as well 

 as of philosophical thought during the greater portion of 

 the nineteenth century. In the course, however, of the 

 long and successful career of this tendency of thought a 

 conviction has gradually crept in that it grasps only one 

 side of the things and phenomena which it undertook to 

 study, and this for two reasons. 



First, it became increasingly evident that by this pro- 

 cess of atomising, of resolving the complex into its 

 component parts, a something was lost, some important 

 feature or principle seemed to drop out or disappear, 

 a something which could not be recovered again in the 

 subsequent synthesis or putting together of the elements 

 which had been laboriously separated : something which 

 was indeed undefinable but nevertheless equally real, 

 something which as in the processes of life and mind 

 marked the very character of their special reality. 

 The atomising process failed to grasp it. 



VOL. iv. 2 E 



