THE RATIONALE OF PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 767 



view, not the construction of a system by starting from 

 some highest truth and following this down in its various 

 manifestations, using it as a master-key by which to gain 

 access to the many regions of science, life, and history ; 

 it rests rather upon the conviction, enormously strength- 

 ened by the later doctrine of evolution, that the different 

 regions of human thought and activity, such as the body 

 of scientific knowledge, the practical systems of morality, 

 law, and society, and, above all, the religious faiths of 

 the world, are existing facts, systems in which certain 

 hidden truths have been established slowly and gradu- 

 ally and through the combined labour of many minds 

 during long ages. 



The construction of a system of philosophy on such a 

 broad inductive basis, the attempt to lay bare the hidden 

 truths contained in those manifold cultural systems 

 elaborated consciously or unconsciously by the efforts 

 of the human mind ; to show their harmonies as well 

 as their discords, and if possible to dissolve the latter ; 

 will seem to many an impossible and premature at- 

 tempt. And so it has actually appeared to the generation 

 which followed Lotze in philosophy ; as, a generation 

 earlier, a similar endeavour had appeared premature to 31. 



Comparison 



those naturalists who read and laid aside Humboldt's ^^ith 



Humboldt s 

 'KoSmOS.' 'Kosmos.' 



This comparative failure of two world-pictures which, 

 in the course of the nineteenth century, were drawn 

 by two intellectual artists neither of whom would 

 profess to have discovered any fundamentally new 

 scientific or philosophical principle has, in both cases, 

 led to a dissipation and disintegration in the thought 



