614 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



the logical process is, by itself alone, incapable of grasp- 

 ing the whole, or can do so only to a moderate extent 

 by that creative synthesis which has been remarked 

 on by thinkers like Lotze and Wundt as a unique 

 property of mental, as distinguished from mechanical, 

 activity. 



Though Schelling abandoned the task which he had 

 set himself in his earlier philosophy of nature, led away 

 by his growing interest in the ethical and religious prob- 

 lems, he, nevertheless, maintained to the end that the 

 purely inductive processes of the natural, as well as the 

 logical deductions of the philosophical, sciences formed 

 only one way of approaching reality. He stigmatised it as 

 " negative," and maintained emphatically that such must 

 find its counterpart and consummation in what he termed 

 a " positive " philosophy. To the end of his days he 

 was in search of this without being able to find for it a 

 satisfactory and adequate expression. Yet in the mean- 

 time, while he was labouring at this unfulfilled task, 

 others, partly with and partly without the help which 

 his earlier suggestive writings afforded, founded or de- 

 veloped that positivism which he was in search of. 

 rfTh'e word ^^^ ^^ ^^ significant to see how the very term Positive 

 positive. ^g^g ^gg^ simultaneously by Comte in France and by 

 religious thinkers in Germany to denote a return from 

 metaphysical abstractions to experience and observation 

 of things natural and human on the one side, to indi- 

 vidual and historical religious experience on the other. 

 And, besides this, we have the naturalistic tendency of 

 poetry and art in this country represented by Words- 

 worth, Coleridge, and, later on, by Kuskin ; whilst in 



47. 



