viii INTRODUCTION 



all four are children of the recent and passing 

 phase of knowledge, characterized by the 

 encyclopaedia whether in "articles" or in 

 "papers," in lecture-courses or in snippets 

 from them all is but a question of magni- 

 tude, a matter of detail. All four readers 

 alike are interested in knowledge of one sort 

 or another; but these are seen mainly as 

 knowledges, and as advancing analyses, 

 rather than as a growing synthesis. So, 

 though they all read very different news- 

 papers, these newspapers are yet much the 

 same, all vividly retrospective of yesterday, 

 and keenly criticizing such and such of its 

 doings, but as yet with little sight of how the 

 day's items are resultants of far distant 

 yesterdays, sowings for far distant morrows. 

 Yet ideas of unity amid diversity, of order 

 amid change, have also long been growing, 

 even finding expression, and this not merely, 

 as sporadically in all ages, in impressions and 

 speculations on decline or on better things; 

 but in clearer and more comprehensive sur- 

 veys of the processes of change, even inquiries 

 into its method. These, in fact, have gone 

 towards making up that general idea we now 

 more or less share, of the universe as not only 

 orderly, but in process of change. Changing 

 order, orderly change, and this everywhere 

 in nature inorganic and organic, in indi- 



