m. ii.] THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY. 39 



pend ntly and out of relation to the percipient mind. Such 

 would have been their answer. But we have seen that no such 

 knowledge of noumena is possible, that the very nature of the 

 cognitive process precludes any such knowledge, and that, if 

 philosophy is to be regarded as knowledge at all, it can have 

 no such scope and function as metaphysicians have assigned to 

 it. What scope is there left for philosophy ? If, like science 

 and common knowledge, it is nothing more than a classification 

 of phenomena in their relations of coexistence and sequence, 

 what is tli ere left i'or it to do which science cannot do as well ? 

 We reply that science can, after all, deal only with par- 

 ticular orders of phenomena. No matter how vast the gene- 

 ralities to which it can attain, it only proclaims truths which 

 hold throughout certain entire classes of phenomena. It 

 does not proclaim truths which hold throughout all classes of 

 phenomena. Its widest truths are astronomic, or chemical, or 

 biological truths ; they are not Cosmic truths, in the fullest 

 sense of that expression. For by science we mean merely 

 the sciences, — the sum of knowledge obtained by systematic 

 inquiries into the various departments of phenomena. Such 

 knowledge is, after all, only an aggregate of parts, each oi 

 which is more or less completely organized in itself: it is not 

 an organic whole, the parts of which are in their mutual 

 relations coordinated with each other. Or, to put the same 

 truth in another form : — The universe of phenomena is an 

 organic whole, the parts of which are not really divisible; 

 though we must needs separate them for convenience of 

 study. We find it necessary to pursue separate lines of in- 

 vestigation for gravitative, or thermal, or chemical, or vital, 

 or psychical, or social phenomena ; but in reality these 

 phenomena are ever intermingled and interactive. Let us, for 

 example, arrive at the widest possible generalization respect- 

 ing astronomic phenomena ; we have still not constructed a 

 body of doctrine concerning the universe, but only concern- 

 ing a portion of it. It is only when the deepest truths 



