mte's assertion that the natural tendency of the
intelligence is to lose itself in difference without end, we might quote
the well-known saying of Bacon, that the tendency of the "_intellectus
sibi permissus_" is rather towards a premature synthesis. "_Intellectus
humanus ex proprietate sua facile supponit majorem ordinem et
aequalitatem in rebus quam invenit_." Surely, if we may speak of
tendencies of the intellectual life as separated from the life of
feeling, the tendency to unity and the universal belongs to it quite as
much as the tendency to difference and the particular; just as in the
life of feeling the tendency to isolation and self-assertion against
others is combined with the tendency to society and union with others.
From the first moment of intellectual life the world is to us a unity;
_subjectively_ a unity, as all its varied phenomena are gathered up in
the consciousness of one self, and _objectively_ a unity, as every
object and event is definitely placed in relation to the other objects
and events in one space and one time. The development of knowledge is,
no doubt, the continual detection of new differences and distinctions in
things, but the phenomena which are distinguished from other phenomena
are at the same time put in relation to them. Nor can the intelligence
find complete satisfaction until this relation is discovered to be
necessary, and thus difference passes into unity again. Individual
minds, indeed, may be more of the Aristotelian, or more of the
Platonist, order, may tend more to divide what at first is presented as
unity, or to unite what at first is presented as difference. But it is
absurd to talk of either tendency as belonging to the intelligence in
itself, since it is utterly beyond, or rather beneath, the powers of
thought to conceive either of an undifferentiated unity, or of a chaos
of differences without some kind of relation. Descending to particulars,
we may bring Comte as a witness against himself; for while he declares
that the sciences which deal with the inorganic world are mainly
analytic in their tendencies, he at the same time maintains that the
sciences of Biology and, still more, of Sociology and Morals, are
synthetic, since they deal with objects in which the whole is not a mere
aggregation or resultant of the parts, but in which rather the parts can
be understood only in and through the whole. Hence it would seem that
the dispersive tendencies of science are confined