EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



science still conveniently recognized, though the 

 barriers between them are merely expressions of 

 our ignorance, are purely artificial, and are rapid- 

 ly being broken down. Each branch of science 

 attempts to co-ordinate the facts that fall within 

 its purview, and thus to unify its knowledge. 

 But when all the barriers are broken down, when 

 each science is shown to depend on all the rest, 

 when the unification" of knowledge is complete, 

 then we have a philosophy which has no depart- 

 ments, since it includes all the facts in one com- 

 prehensive view. It is in this sense that we 

 speak of the synthetic philosophy, since philosophy, 

 to be such, is essentially a synthesis, a placing 

 together of all knowledge alike of atoms, of soci- 

 eties, of mind, and of the products of mind. It 

 remains to be shown, in ensuing chapters, that the 

 conception of evolution has, indeed, accomplished 

 this unification of all knowledge, absorbing facts 

 discussed after its formulation, as readily as those 

 from which it was originally inferred, and that it 

 is therefore rightly to be called a philosophy. 



The reader will observe that there is implicit in 

 this definition a magnificent assumption. When 

 we speak of the unification of knowledge as possi- 

 ble, we assume that that to which all knowledge 

 refers is a unity ; otherwise no unification would be 

 possible. The modern conception of philosophy, 

 therefore, contains within it what is surely the 

 greatest of all conceptions that, all phenomena 

 being interdependent, the reality of which they 

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