290 .EVOLUTION AND DISSOLUTION. 



ried to build the house, it finds that this was once a loose 

 sediment deposited in an estuary or on the sea bottom. 



If, then, the past and the future of each object, is a 

 sphere of possible knowledge; and if intellectual progress 

 consists largely, if not mainly, in widening our acquaint- 

 ance with this past and this future; it is obvious that we 

 have not acquired all the information within the grasp of 

 our intelligence until we can, in some way or other, express 

 the whole past and the whole future of each object and the 

 aggregate of objects. Usually able, as we are, to say of any 

 visible tangible thing how it came to have its present shape 

 and consistence; we are fully possessed with the conviction 

 that, setting out abruptly as we do with some substance 

 which already had a concrete form, our history is incom- 

 plete: the thing had a history preceding the state with 

 which we started. Hence our Theory of Things, considered 

 individually or in their totality, is confessedly imperfect so 

 long as any past or future portions of their sensible exist- 

 ences are unaccounted for. 



May it not be inferred that Philosophy has to formulate 

 this passage from the imperceptible into the perceptible, 

 and again from the perceptible into the imperceptible? Is 

 it not clear that this general law of the redistribution of mat- 

 ter and motion, which we lately saw is required to unify the 

 various kinds of changes, must also be one that unifies the 

 successive changes which sensible existences, separately and 

 together, pass through? Only by some formula combining 

 these characters can knowledge be reduced to a coherent 

 whole. 



94. Already in the foregoing paragraphs the outline 

 of such a formula is foreshadowed. Already in recognizing 

 the fact that Science, tracing back the genealogies of vari- 

 ous objects, finds their components were once in diffused 

 states, and pursuing their histories forwards, finds diffused 

 states will be again assumed by them, we have recognized 



