338 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



aspects which have as yet singly presented themselves to 

 the human intellect. Expressed in other words, it will 

 always be the tendency of the philosophic mind to 

 take transcendent views, to look at things as Spinoza 

 said, " suh specie aeternitatis," whereas it is the character- 

 istic of the scientific mind to look at everything " suh 

 specie iiniformitatis," bringing as it were everything to 

 the same level and under the same 'rule and measure. 

 What to the philosopher is transcendent becomes to the 

 scientific mind immanent and must become so if it is to 

 be a fruitful idea. Thinkers like Plato, Spinoza, and 

 Hegel have established the transcendent point of view, 

 but they or their successors have usually failed when 

 they attempted to bring it down to the level of a useful 

 rule or principle of thought ; or they have succeeded 

 only by losing hold of its transcendence. This has 

 notably been the case in the Hegelian school, in 

 which the transcendentalists have not succeeded in 

 carrying further or even in maintaining the lofty specu- 

 lation of their master ; whereas the opposed section 

 have, in the course of their varied researches, gradually 

 lost sight of Hegel's central idea : the gradual un- 

 folding of the Absolute, or the Divine Spirit.^ Now it 

 is characteristic of nineteenth century thought that, in 

 its scientific development, it for a time strengthened 

 the belief that a purely mechanical formula would 

 suffice for the gradual, though possibly very remote, com- 

 prehension of all the facts and phenomena of experi- 



' D. F. Strauss, the celebrated facetiously to a friend that Hegel- 

 author of the ' Life of Jesus,' who ianistn had become to him, after 

 started from the Hegelian j)oint of all, little more than " a shaky 

 view, wrote, in his later life, double tooth." 



