PREFACE 



called " Cosmic " while professing to deal with 

 existence not included within the phenomenal 

 world. The term, therefore, forcibly distin- 

 guishes Mr. Spencer's philosophy from systems 

 which have contained ontological or theological 

 assumptions. And on the other hand, as is 

 shown below, in the ninth and tenth chapters 

 of Part I., it distinguishes it from Positivism ; 

 since the latter philosophy consists of an Or- 

 ganon of scientific methods ancillary to the con- 

 struction of a system of Sociology, and has 

 always implicitly denied the practical possibility 

 of such a unified doctrine of the Cosmos as Mr. 

 Spencer has succeeded in making. In short, 

 Mr. Spencer's philosophy is not merely a Syn- 

 thesis, but it is a " Cosmic Synthesis ; " that is, 

 it is a system which, without making appeal to 

 data that are ontological or to agencies that are 

 extra-cosmic, brings all known truths concern- 

 ing the coexistence and succession of pheno- 

 mena into relation with one another as the 

 corollaries of a single primordial truth, which is 

 alleged of the omnipresent Existence (ignored 

 by Positivism), whereof the phenomenal world 

 is the multiform manifestation. To no other 

 system yet devised can this definition be strictly 

 applied ; and of no other system can we strictly 

 say that it is " Cosmic." 

 xii 



