PESSIMISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE. 219 



ledge will go much further than was at first suspected, 

 even towards the answering, not merely of the old 

 metaphysical questions of free-will, providence, and the 

 like, in a scientific manner, but even in giving answer 

 to the question acknowledged since the time of Kant to 

 be the chief philosophical question, namely, How we 

 come to have knowledge or experience, or " What makes 

 experience possible." This question is answered in our 

 days by positive science, and from the general point of 

 view of experience, by psychology, physiology, and the 

 demonstrated fact of inherited mental aptitudes, by 

 which it is shown that all knowledge in the individual 

 is unfolded from a germinal point, just as his body is ; 

 that each individual is born with the potentiality of 

 developing all the inherited ideas of the race ; and that, 

 in the race itself, or rather in the total series of animals 

 of which man is the last and highest, all knowledge 

 gradually unfolded itself from a similar zero point, by 

 insensible gradations. Thus Herbert Spencer and Darwin 

 explain from experience what was regarded by the 

 intuitional school as the a priori and mysterious element 

 in knowledge, not to be accounted for from any experi- 

 ence. Our a priori notions are brought under the facts 

 and laws of heredity and evolution, and thus the question 

 of knowledge itself, so far as answerable by the human 

 mind, is answered from the positive scientific point of 

 view. Knowledge has unfolded itself gradually in the 

 total organic world, as we know it now does in each 

 individual. But the question how the first faint glimmer 

 of any knowledge first broke in a world previously 

 unconscious, is as unanswerable as the question how life 

 first appeared. All that we can say is, that from its 

 commencement it was conditioned by the material 

 organization of the brain and nerves, as life was bound 



