THE RATIONALE OF PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 775 



whole and not in their isolation or in their parts. This 

 tendency is clearly marked not only in philosophical 

 but also in scientific thought. It underlies quite as 

 much the world-picture drawn by Humboldt as it does 

 the views of Lamarck and Darwin as to environment in 

 space and succession in time, and the attempt of Lotze 

 to look at the universe from the microcosmic or anthro- 

 pological point of view. It showed itself in the most 

 abstract of all sciences, in modern mathematics, which 

 opposed line and plane geometry to the point 

 geometry of Descartes ; the theory of groups and 

 arrangements to that of mere quantity. 



In psychology, the older theory of sensations, the 

 doctrine of separate faculties or of the association of 

 ideas, has been superseded by the conception of the con- 

 tinuum of presentations or experience and the stream of 

 thought. In biology and still more in sociology the 

 vue d'ensemble of Comte has come to the front, and even 

 where the search for biological or sociological units has 

 been prominent, these units have been found to possess 

 a complexity of structure without which neither the 

 phenomena of physical nor those of social life could be 

 explained. The older processes of dissecting and atom- 

 ising with the aim of putting together again the com- 

 bined processes of analysis and subsequent synthesis, have 

 been found eminently useful for practical purposes, but 

 essentially deficient in explaining things real. Natural- 

 ists as well as artists have emphasised the necessity of 

 sight as opposed to thought. And even in practical life 

 the synoptic view has become more and more indispens- 

 able through the enormous changes in the commercial 



