374 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. hi, 



tion of the results of countless new observations in all 

 departments of science ; and philosophy, refraining more 

 and more from ontological speculations, is becoming more 

 and more thoroughly identified with cosmology. It is re- 

 cognizing more and more fully that its proper business is 

 to oversee and coordinate those seemingly separate groups 

 of scientific truths which scientific specialists have not the 

 leisure, and often neither the desire nor the ability, to co- 

 ordinate. And obviously the philosophy most completely 

 organized after this manner, constitutes the most complete 

 integration of correspondences between the order of con- 

 ceptions and the order of phenomena. It constitutes an 

 integral body of knowledge, the various members of which 

 are at once more distinctly demarcated from each other and 

 more intimately dependent upon each other than in any 

 previous system. 



Thus, in accordance with the expectation held out in an 

 earlier chapter,^ we find that " from the earliest traceable 

 cosmical changes down to the latest products of civiliza- 

 tion," there has been going on, and is going on, a ceaseless 

 process of change, of which the main features are simple 

 enough to be clearly deducible from the known physical 

 properties of the universe, but of which the stupendous 

 grandeur is such as to baffle the most strenuous efforts 

 alike of reason and of imagination to follow it out in all 

 its concrete details. Thus, too, we find ourselves amply 

 rewarded for the hope with which we set out upon our in- 

 quiry, — namely, that in henceforth abandoning vain onto- 

 logical speculation we were by no means about to dethrone 

 Philosophy, but were on the point of winning for it even 

 a goodlier realm than that which metaphysics had assigned 

 to it. For in comparison with the sublime synthesis of trutha 

 which the foregoing chapters have but unworthily interpreted, 

 all previous philosophic speculation seems fragmentary, crude 

 * See above, voL i. p. 352. 



