to solve the mystery of the Universe. But Spencer alone has ventured to face this abysmal problem by a scheme of logical deductions from the positive sciences, from the experience of a multiplicity of real observations of the phenomena of Nature and Man. What the 'Ideas' were to Plato, or the Church to Aquinas, or the Categories to Kant, that, and more than that, Evolution is to Spencer. 'Throughout the Universe, in general and in detail, there is an unceasing redistribution of matter and motion.' Thus he opens his new Book of Genesis.
Surely, the most ardent Spencerian will hardly contend that this enormous claim has been admitted as yet at the tribunal of contemporary philosophy. To my own humble intelligence it sounds a paradox to find one, who is so keen a believer in the relativity of all knowledge, so ruthless an antagonist of any dogmatizing about the Absolute or Unconditioned Existence, the apostle, in fact, of the limitless and mystical Unknowable, the sad meditator on the infinitesimal littleness of man and his planetary speck amid the numberless millions of far grander suns—to find him, I say, revealing to us the Law of the whole Universe, on grounds, be it said, not of revelation, not of intuition, not on the a priori logic of pure reason, not of the still small voice innate in the human soul, but on grounds of demonstrated science, drawn from real observations and the record of our senses in experience.
According to the far humbler school in which I have been trained, any Objective synthesis, i. e. any co-ordination of our knowledge of phenomena according to their actual order in rerum natura, is an impossible Utopia. A true 'Cosmic philosophy,' to use the term of Spencer's American disciple, Prof. Fiske, is beyond the
