had the courage to develop a system of natural philosophy, and to
condemn such investigators as Boyle and Newton; upon Hegel (1770-1831),
who undertakes to construct the whole system of reality out of
concepts, and who, with his immediate predecessors, brought philosophy
for a while into more or less disrepute with men of a scientific turn
of mind. I shall come down quite to our own times, and consider a man
whose conception of philosophy has had and still has a good deal of
influence, especially with the general public--with those to whom
philosophy is a thing to be taken up in moments of leisure, and cannot
be the serious pursuit of a life.

"Knowledge of the lowest kind," says Herbert Spencer, "is _un-unified_
knowledge; Science is _partially-unified_ knowledge; Philosophy is
_completely-unified_ knowledge." [1] Science, he argues, means merely
the family of the Sciences--stands for nothing more than the sum of
knowledge formed of their contributions. Philosophy is the fusion of
these contributions into a whole; it is knowledge of the greatest
generality. In harmony with this notion Spencer produced a system of
philosophy which includes the following: A volume entitled "First
Principles," which undertakes to show what man can and what man cannot
know; a treatise on the principles of biology; another on the
principles of psychology; still another on the principles of sociology;
and finally one on the principles of morality. To complete the scheme
it would have been necessary to give an account of inorganic nature
before going on to the phenomena of life, but our philosopher found the
task too great and left this out.

Now, Spencer was a man of genius, and one finds in his works many
illuminating thoughts. But it is worthy of remark that those who
praise his work in this or in that field are almost always men who have