284: RECAPITULATION, CRITICISM, AND RECOMMENCEMENT. 



only Philosophy finds its goal. It has been supposed by 

 one thinker that when Science has succeeded in reducing all 

 more complex laws to some most simple law, as of molecular 

 action, knowledge will have reached its limit. Another 

 authority has tacitly asserted that all minor facts are so 

 merged in the major fact that the force everywhere in action 

 is nowhere lost, that to express this is to express " the consti- 

 tution of the universe. 77 But either conclusion implies a 

 misapprehension of the problem. 



For these are all analytical truths, and no analytical 

 truth no number of analytical truths, will make up that 

 synthesis of thought which alone can be an interpretation of 

 the synthesis of things. The decomposition of phenomena 

 into their elements, is but a preparation for understanding 

 phenomena in their state of composition, as actually mani- 

 fested. To have ascertained the laws of the factors is not 

 at all to have ascertained the laws of their co-operation. 

 The question is, not how any factor, Matter or Motion or 

 Force, behaves by itself, or under some imagined simple 

 conditions ; nor is it even how one factor behaves under the 

 complicated conditions of actual existence. The thing to 

 be expressed is the joint product of the factors under all its 

 various aspects. Only when we can formulate the total 

 process, have we gained that knowledge of it which Philoso- 

 phy aspires to. A clear comprehension of this matter is im- 

 portant enough to justify some further exposition. 



91. Suppose a chemist, a geologist, and a biologist, 

 have given the deepest explanations furnished by their 

 respective sciences, of the processes going on in a burning 

 candle, in a region changed by earthquake, and in a grow- 

 ing plant. To the assertion that their explanations are not 

 the deepest possible, they will probably rejoin " What 

 would you have? What remains to be said of combustion 

 when light and heat and the dissipation of substance have 

 all been traced down to the liberation of molecular motion 



