NATURAL SCIENCE TO GENERAL SCIENCE. 5 



been brought out into more distinct relief by that philosophy. 

 Certainly, at the end of the last century, when the Kantian 

 philosophy reigned supreme, such a schism had never been pro- 

 claimed; on the contrary, Kant's philosophy rested on exactly 

 the same ground as the physical sciences, as is evident from his 

 own scientific works, especially from his 'Cosmogony,' based 

 upon Newton's Law of Gravitation, which afterwards, under 

 the name of Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis, came to be uni- 

 versally recognised. The sole object of Kant's 'Critical Phi- 

 losophy ' was to test the sources and the authority of our 

 knowledge, and to fix a definite scope and standard for the 

 researches of philosophy, as compared with other sciences. 

 According to his teaching, a principle discovered a priori by 

 pure thought was a rule applicable to the method of pure 

 thought, and nothing further ; it could contain no real, positive 

 knowledge. The ' Philosophy of Identity ' l was bolder. It 

 started with the hypothesis that not only spiritual phenomena, 

 but even the actual world nature, that is, and man were the 

 result of an act of thought on the part of a creative mind, 

 similar, it was supposed, in kind to the human mind. On this 

 hypothesis it seemed competent for the human mind, even with- 

 out the guidance of external experience, to think over again the 

 thoughts of the Creator, and to rediscover them by its own 

 inner activity. Such was the view with which the ' Philosophy 

 of Identity' set to work to construct a priori the results of 

 other sciences. The process might be more or less successful in 

 matters of theology, law, politics, language, art, history, in short, 

 in all sciences the subject-matter of which really grows out of 

 our moral nature, and which are therefore properly classed 

 together under the name of moral sciences. The state, the 

 church, art and language, exist in order to satisfy certain moral 

 needs of man. Accordingly, whatever obstacles nature, or 

 chance, or the rivalry of other men may interpose, the eiforts of 

 the human mind to satisfy its needs, being systematically directed 

 to one end, must eventually triumph over all such fortuitous 



1 So called because it proclaimed the identity not only of subject and object, 

 but of contradictories, such as existence and non-existence. Til. 



