COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



ceived the limits of philosophic inquiry. 1 But 

 what shall we say when we find him asserting 

 the impossibility of a science of stellar astro- 

 nomy ? He tells us that we have not even the 



1 It is interesting to note that disciples of Comte are still to 

 be found, so incapable of realizing that the arbitrary dicta of 

 their master did not constitute the final utterance of human sci- 

 ence, that they oppose the Doctrine of Evolution upon no 

 other ground than the assumed incapacity of the human mind 

 for dealing with origins ! In a discussion held in New York 

 some two years since on the subject of ** Darwinism," a cer- 

 tain disciple of Comte observed that it was useless for man to 

 pretend to know how he originated, when he could not ascer- 

 tain the origin of anything ! Nevertheless, since we do find 

 ourselves able to point out the origin of many things, from a 

 myth or a social observance to a freshet or the fall of an ava- 

 lanche, it appears that our Comtist was playing upon words 

 after the scholastic or Platonic fashion, and confounding prox- 

 imate ** origin," which is a subject for science, with ultimate 

 ** origin," which must be relegated to metaphysics. Had 

 Comte carried out this principle consistently, he would never 

 have written his Philosophy of History, since the explanation 

 of the social phenomena existing in any age is the determina- 

 tion of their mode of origin from the social phenomena of the 

 preceding age. But if with the aid of historic data we may go 

 back three thousand years, there is no reason why, with the 

 aid of geologic, astronomic, and chemical data, we should not 

 go back, if necessary, a thousand billion years, and investigate 

 the origin of the earth from the solar nebula, or the origin of 

 life from aggregations of colloidal matter. In either case, the 

 problem is one, not of ultimate origin, but of evolution. In 

 neither case do we seek to account for the origin of the mat- 

 ter and motion which constitute the phenomenal universe, but 

 only to discover a formula which shall express the common 

 9 2 



