PESSIMISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE. 211 



factorily and finally demonstrated. There exists for men 

 only phenomena, and Science gives us the only reliable 

 and systematized knowledge of these, which knowledge 

 is merely the invariable relations, or the unchanging 

 successions and the constant co-existences of the same 

 facts or phenomena. These are all that man can know, 

 all that Science can discover : but happily such know- 

 ledge is all that we require, and all that we should ask. 

 It suffices for an intelligent understanding of the universe, 

 for the mastery of Nature, for a wise and rational regula- 

 tion of life and conduct. What more would man require ? 

 Truth for man is only science a knowledge of the facts 

 and laws ascertained by science, or by historical investi- 

 gation, working by the methods and animated and 

 guided by the spirit of science. Philosophy itself is only 

 science, at least, if men insist upon a philosophy other 

 than the general conclusions of science in the mental and 

 moral departments of inquiry ; if a distinction must be 

 drawn between science and philosophy, then philosophy 

 can only be the systematic connection of the highest 

 conceptions and generalizations supplied by science 

 causation, evolution, the law of gravity, of the persistence 

 of energy, of natural selection, and the application of 

 these to explain the facts and lower laws of things. 

 Philosophy, or metaphysics, as Aristotle conceived it, 

 comes thus after physics, and exhibits the skeleton 

 system of laws, which holds the cosmos together, and 

 which governs life and mind, with the lower laws affili- 

 ated to the higher, and these again to a few or one 

 highest, which Science has reached or hopes yet to reach. 

 But all philosophy which does not rest on a basis of 

 science and fact, all philosophy which pretends to pene- 

 trate behind phenomena, and to make even a single 

 affirmation respecting what it affects to discover in that 



