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intellectual activity it may often seem to lead to contradiction. 
Why should it lead to real or to apparent contradiction ? 
Even within the limits of severe knowledge, laying aside fancy 
and poetry, there is an immense difference between, leading to a 
divergence between, experimental observation and philosophic or 
speculative thought. Some minds are made for the one, some 
minds are made for the other. It is only the rarer minds, the im- 
mensely comprehensive minds, that seem capable of fully combin- 
ing these two qualities in perfection. We know that this combina- 
tion did exist in Aristotle—equally wonderful, equally admirable as 
a scientific observer and asa philosophic speculator; but in the 
average of men the one or the other fitness is very apt to predomi- 
nate, and, if it is predominant, is apt to run into exclusiveness, 
and, if that tendency to exclusiveness be not counteracted, after 
awhile the scientific observer and the philosophic thinker may have 
drifted so far apart that they seem to be in conflict, in contradic- 
tion, that they may seem to find it impossible to come into agree- 
ment or even to find a common ground for argument. 
When both gifts are combined in some great man, then it be- 
comes evident to him, and his experience serves as a demonstration 
to others, that between the two—between the scientific and the 
philosophical—there cannot be a contradiction. But whenever the 
speculative or the experimental claims for itself exclusiveness, then 
the result is one-sidedness, and the one-sided thinker is apt to tum- 
ble over into chaos, or, what is almost equally bad, to rebound 
to an opposite extreme. So it is with individuals, so it is with 
epochs, with generations. Some great man puts the stamp of his 
mind on his epoch, and it is philosophic or it is positivist and 
scientific ; and in the epoch even more than in the individual, be- 
cause the epoch has time to work out the logic of things which may 
not be given to the individual, extremism or one-sidedness is cer- 
tain to lead to a rebound, to a reaction that tends towards and may 
reach the opposite extreme. 
During our century and a half, this has been made abundantly 
evident to the world. When our Society began, Kant was calmly 
investigating the value and the limits of human knowledge, work- 
ing out what posterity recognized to be objective scepticism, It 
led to the rebound of extreme idealism, led by such men as Fichte, 
Schelling and Hegel, and that idealism went to such extremes as 
simply to bring philosophy into contempt. It led to the opposite 
