NATURAL SCIENCE TO GENERAL SCIENCE. 9 



time the attention of investigators in the moral sciences 

 had been constantly and more keenly directed to the 

 scope of those sciences, and to their intellectual con- 

 tents, and therefore the great amount of labour bestowed 

 on those systems has not been entirely thrown away. 



We see, then, that in proportion as the experimental 

 investigation of facts has recovered its importance in the 

 moral sciences, the opposition between them and the 

 physical sciences has become less and less marked. Yet 

 we must not forget that, though this opposition was 

 brought out in an unnecessarily exaggerated form by the 

 Hegelian philosophy, it has its foundation in the nature 

 of things, and must, sooner or later, make itself felt. It 

 depends partly on the nature of the intellectual processes 

 the two groups of sciences involve, partly, as their very 

 names imply, on the subjects of which they treat. It is 

 not easy for a scientific man to convey to a scholar or a 

 jurist a clear idea of a complicated process of nature ; 

 he must demand of them a certain power of abstraction 

 from the phenomena, as well as a certain skill in the use 

 of geometrical and mechanical conceptions, in which it is 

 difficult for them to follow him. On the other liand an 

 artist or a theologian will perhaps find the natural philo- 

 sopher too much inclined to mechanical and material 

 explanations, which seem to them commonplace, and 

 chilling to their feeling and enthusiasm. Nor will the 

 scholar or the historian, who have some common ground 

 with the theologian and the jurist, fare better with the 

 natural philosopher. They will find him shockingly 

 indifferent to literary treasures, perhaps even more in- 

 different than he ought to be to the history of his own 

 science. In short, there is no denying that, while the 

 moral sciences deal directly with the nearest and dearest 

 interests of the human mind, and with the institutions 

 it has brought into being, the natural sciences are con- 



