THE RATIONALE OF PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 769 



Newtonian law of attraction, or action at a distance, 

 which governed much scientific thought in the earlier 

 part of the century, and appears again in a modified 

 form in Herbert Spencer's system ; Buchner's principles 

 of Kraft und Stoff ; the principle of Energy in the 

 writings of Ostwald and others ; the principle of descent 

 and evolution, and Haeckel's Law of Substance. 



A feature common to all these principles and 

 their elaboration is that they deal with things and 

 events which exist or have existed somewhere in space, 

 and, as such, must somehow partake of the nature 

 of space, being subject to geometrical rule and order. 

 Two difficulties, however, arise which stand in the way 

 of the completion of this world-picture, which we may 

 term, with Humboldt, the physical description of the 

 Universe. 



The first difficulty is that in stating ever so com- 

 pletely the uniformities and regularities of natural facts 

 and events we are dealing only with an abstraction, 

 a lifeless mechanism. In the actual world itself this, 

 ever - repeated order exists only in innumerable living 

 examples, in occurrences which might, so far as we 

 know, also be quite different. For the actual order 

 what we may term the collocation of things the laws 

 of nature give us no explanation. Now, if this scientific 

 or mechanical order of things in space and time is only 33. 

 an abstraction, the question arises: Where does this tmcorderan 



abstraction. 



abstraction, as a matter of fact, exist ? 



An attempt to answer this question raises a second 

 difficulty, for it introduces us to another world, which 

 we may term the inner as contrasted with the outer 



VOL. iv. 3 c 



