an academic question, and has frequently been
met in the spirit of rivalry and partisanship. But the true order of
knowledge is only temporarily distorted by the brilliant success of a
special type of investigation; and the conquests of science are now so
old a story that critical thought shows a disposition to judge of the
issue with sobriety and logical highmindedness.

In the seventeenth century a newly emancipated and too sanguine reason
proposed to know the whole of nature at once in terms of mathematics
and mechanics. Thus the system of the Englishman Hobbes was science
swelled to world-proportions, simple, compact, conclusive, and
all-comprehensive. Philosophy proposed to do the work of science, but in
its own grand manner. The last twenty years of Hobbes's life, spent in
repeated discomfiture at the hands of Seth Ward, Wallis, Boyle, and
other scientific experts of the new Royal Society, certified
conclusively to the failure of this enterprise, and the experimental
specialist thereupon took exclusive possession of the field of natural
law. But the idealist, on the other hand, reconstructed nature to meet
the demands of philosophical knowledge and religious faith. There
issued, together with little mutual understanding and less sympathy, on
the one hand _positivism_, or exclusive experimentalism, and on the
other hand a rabid and unsympathetic transcendentalism. Hume, who
consigned to the flames all thought save "abstract reasoning concerning
quantity or number," and "experimental reasoning concerning matter of
fact and existence"; Comte, who assigned metaphysics to an immature
stage in the development of human intelligence; and Tyndall, who reduced
the religious consciousness to an emotional experience of mystery, are
typical of the one attitude. The other is well exhibited in Schelling's
reference to "the blind and thoughtless mode of investigating nature
which has become generally established since the corruption of
philosophy by Bacon, and of physics by Boyle." Dogmatic experimentalism
and dogmatic idealism signify more or less consistently the abstract
isolation of the scientific and philosophical motives.

There is already a touch of quaintness in both of these attitudes. We of
the present are in the habit of acknowledging the autonomy of science,
and the unimpeachable validity of the results of experimental research
in so far as they are sanctioned by the consensus of experts. But at the
same time we rec