ognize the definiteness of the task of science, and the
validity of such reservations as may be made from a higher critical
point of view. Science is to be transcended in so far as it is
understood as a whole. Philosophy is critically empirical; empirical,
because it regards all _bona fide_ descriptions of experience as
knowledge; critical, because attentive to the conditions of both general
and special knowledge. And in terms of a critical empiricism so defined,
it is one of the problems of philosophy _to define and appraise the
generating problem of science_, and so to determine the value
assignable to natural laws in the whole system of knowledge.

[Sidenote: The Spheres of Philosophy and Science.]

Sect. 40. If this be the true function of philosophy with reference to
science, several current notions of the relations of the spheres of
these disciplines may be disproved. In the first place, philosophy will
not be all the sciences regarded as one science. Science tends to unify
without any higher criticism. The various sciences already regard the
one nature as their common object, and the one system of interdependent
laws as their common achievement. The philosopher who tries to be all
science at once fails ignominiously because he tries to replace the work
of a specialist with the work of a dilettante; and if philosophy be
identical with that body of truth accumulated and organized by the
cooperative activity of scientific men, then philosophy is a name and
there is no occasion for the existence of the philosopher as such.
Secondly, philosophy will not be the assembling of the sciences; for
such would be a merely clerical work, and the philosopher would much
better be regarded as non-existent than as a book-keeper. Nor, thirdly,
is philosophy an auxiliary discipline that may be called upon in
emergencies for the solution of some baffling problem of science. A
problem defined by science must be solved in the scientific manner.
Science will accept no aid from the gods when engaged in her own
campaign, but will fight it out according to her own principles of
warfare. And as long as science moves in her own plane, she can
acknowledge no permanent barriers. There is then no need of any
superscientific research that shall replace, or piece together, or
extend the work of science. But the savant is not on this account in
possession of the entire field of knowledge. It is true that he is not
infrequently moved to such a con