safely be anticipated. It is certain that no living voice is known to
speak for this generation as did Hegel, and even Spencer, for the last.
There is, however, a significance in this very passing of Hegel and
Spencer,--an enlightenment peculiar to an age which knows them, but has
philosophically outlived them. There is a moral in the history of
thought which just now no philosophy, whether naturalism, or
transcendentalism, realism or idealism, can fail to draw. The
characterization of this contemporary eclecticism or sophistication,
difficult and uncertain as it must needs be, affords the best summary
and interpretation with which to conclude this brief survey of the
fortunes of philosophy.

[Sidenote: Metaphysics. The Antagonistic Doctrines of Naturalism and
Absolutism.]

Sect. 198. Since the problem of metaphysics is the crucial problem of
philosophy, the question of its present status is fundamental in any
characterization of the age. It will appear from the foregoing account
of the course of metaphysical development that two fundamental
tendencies have exhibited themselves from the beginning. The one of
these is naturalistic and empirical, representing the claims of what
common sense calls "matters of fact"; the other is transcendental and
rational, representing the claims of the standards and ideals which are
immanent in experience, and directly manifested in the great human
interests of thought and action. These tendencies have on the whole been
antagonistic; and the clear-cut and momentous systems of philosophy have
been fundamentally determined by either the one or the other.

Thus materialism is due to the attempt to reduce all of experience to
the elements and principles of connection which are employed by the
physical sciences to set in order the actual motions, or changes of
place, which the parts of experience undergo. Materialism maintains that
the motions of bodies are indifferent to considerations of worth, and
denies that they issue from a deeper cause of another order. The very
ideas of such non-mechanical elements or principles are here provided
with a mechanical origin. Similarly a phenomenalism, like that of Hume,
takes immediate presence to sense as the norm of being and knowledge.
Individual items, directly verified in the moment of their occurrence,
are held to be at once the content of all real truth, and the source of
those abstract ideas which the misguided rationalists mistake for real
t