NATURAL SCIENCE TO GENERAL SCIENCE. 7 



philosophers, abound. He had, for the most part, only to 

 collect and combine them, in order to produce a system 

 calculated to impress people by a number of acute and 

 original observations. He thus succeeded in gaining the 

 enthusiastic approval of most of the educated men of his 

 time, and in raising extravagantly sanguine hopes of 

 solving the deepest enigma of human life ; all the more 

 sanguine doubtless, as the connection of his system was 

 disguised under a strangely abstract phraseology, and was 

 perhaps really understood by but few of his worshippers. 



But even granting that Hegel was more or less suc- 

 cessful in constructing, a priori, the leading results of 

 the moral sciences, still it was no proof of the correctness 

 of the hypothesis of Identity, with which he started. 

 The facts of nature would have been the crucial test. 

 That in the moral sciences traces of the activity of the 

 human intellect and of the several stages of its develop- 

 ment should present themselves, was a matter of course ; 

 but surely, if nature really reflected the result of the 

 thought of a creative mind, the system ought, without 

 difficulty, to find a place for her comparatively simple 

 phenomena and processes. It was at this point that 

 Hegel's philosophy, we venture to say, utterly broke 

 down. His system of nature seemed, at least to natural 

 philosophers, absolutely crazy. Of all the distinguished 

 scientific men who were his contemporaries, not one was 

 found to stand up for his ideas. Accordingly, Hegel 

 himself, convinced of the importance of winning for 

 his philosophy in the field of physical science that recog- 

 nition which had been so freely accorded to it elsewhere, 

 launched out, with unusual vehemence and acrimony, 

 against the natural philosophers, and especially against 

 Sir Isaac Newton, as the first and greatest representative 

 of physical investigation. The philosophers accused the 

 scientific men of narrowness ; the scientific men retorted 



