en. ii.] THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY. 41 



enough the point which I am endeavouring to elucidate. The 

 difference between philosophy and science, like the difference 

 between science and common knowledge, is a difference in 

 degree only. But the distinction is nevertheless a broad one, 

 and as such is somewhat understated in the foregoing para- 

 graph, because the examples there cited on the side of science 

 are all taken from that transcendental region of science in 

 which its problems begin to have implications almost a? 

 universal as the problems of philosophy. Thoroughly to 

 estimate the character of the distinction, we shall do well to 

 start somewhat further down, and note what the science is 

 which is contained in text-books or in original monographs. 

 Viewed from this stand-point, a science like biology, for 

 example, has for its subject-matter questions concerning the 

 changes undergone by starch or fibrine within the stomach, 

 the distribution of cells and fibres in the tissue of the brain, 

 the relations of blood-supply to the functional activity of any 

 organ, the manner in which the optic nerve is made to respond 

 diversely to rays of different refrangibility impinging upon 

 the retina, or the growth of bone from sundry centres of 

 ossification starting here and there in the primitive cartilage ; 

 or again such questions as concern the generic or ordinal 

 relationships of barnacles, or bats, or elephants, the homologies 

 between a bird's wing and a dog's fore-leg, the geographical 

 distribution of butterflies, or ferns, or pine-trees, the typical 

 structures of vertebrates or annulosa, or the kinships between 

 fossil forms of the horse and pig. In these questions, and a 

 thousand others like them, we see at once' that we are in the 

 special domain of biology, and that our reasonings belong 

 unmistakably to science, and not to common knowledge on 

 he one hand, or to philosophy on the other. If now. after 

 mastering countless details of this sort, we go en to inquire 

 into the cause of the bilateral symmetry of lobsters and 

 centipedes, or of the spiral arrangement of leaves around a 

 Btem; if we seek to generalize the phenomena of heredity, 



