ch. 11.] THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY. 43 



belong strictly to philosophy, and constitute the all-essential 

 part of it, can be questioned by none save those who, with 

 Hegel, would make philosophy synonymous with ontology. 

 Upon these it is incumbent, if they would establish their 

 position, to dispose of the facts and reasonings which have 

 made the relativity of all knowledge the fundamental theorem 

 of modern psychology. For us it may suffice to point out 

 that the province of philosophy, as here defined, includes all 

 such inquiries into cosmology, into psychology and ethics and 

 religion, as philosophers have occupied themselves with in 

 the past, excepting those only in which the necessary limita- 

 tions of human thinking have been expressly or tacitly 

 ignored. Far from dethroning philosophy, we are assigning 

 to it a scope as wide as was recognized for it by the early 

 Greeks; while in approaching its problems, we are enabled 

 to profit by that physical investigation which Sokrates not 

 unjustly stigmatized, in his own day, as hopelessly mislead- 

 ing, but which now, conducted upon sounder methods, is our 

 surest guide to the knowledge of truth. 



Thus is philosophy vindicated, and its function is seen to 

 be as important as that of science. Eejecting, as we were 

 compelled to do, the metaphysical assumption that philosophy 

 is a kind of knowledge generically distinct from all other 

 kinds, and asserting for it a common root with science and 

 with ordinary knowledge, we have nevertheless seen that it 

 differs from the two latter, much in the same way that the one 

 of them differs from the other. Accurate quantitative pre- 

 vision is, in the nature of things, confined to the most special 

 of the special inquiries with which science is concerned. 

 Limited as it is to individual cases occurring under general 

 laws, it must be left on one side in enumerating the distinc- 

 tive features of philosophy. But from what has been brought 

 forward, it at once appears that philosophy differs from science 

 in the greater generality, abstractness, and remoteness of 

 the relations which it formulates, and also in its larger and 



