MAN AND SCIENCE: A REPLY.

WHEN the history of modern thought comes to be written in the future, nothing will appear more remarkable to the student of these times than the great divergence, or rather the irreconcilable antagonism, between the utterances of philosophy and the revelations of exact science. That philosophy should transcend science, that it should be something more than a summary of results, is too evident even to require admission ; that it should be in absolute contradiction to these results, that it should set aside or distort the most familiar facts, the best established data of science, will scarcely be claimed by its most ardent votaries. Is this the case ?

What is philosophy? It is the systematisation of the conceptions furnished by science. As science is the systematisation of the various generalities reached through particulars, so philosophy is the systematisation of the generalities of generalities. In other words, science furnishes the knowledge, and philosophy the doctrine.' What is truth? It is the correspondence between the order of ideas and the order of phenomena, so that the one becomes a reflection of the other—the movement of thought following the movement of things.' For practical purposes, nothing more clear or comprehensive can be required than these definitions, which are given by Mr. Lewes in the preface' to his History of Philosophy.

The knowledge referred to is defined as arising from the indisputable conclusions of experience ;' and the domain of philosophy is thus limited :—Whilst theology claims to furnish a system of religious conceptions, and science to furnish conceptions of the order of the world, philosophy, detaching their widest conceptions from both, furnishes a doctrine which contains an explanation of the world and of human destiny.'

In furnishing this explanation, has our modern philosophy been subject to these limitations ? Has she been content to generalise the 'indisputable conclusions of experience '? Or bas she wildly plunged into the ocean of reckless conjecture, and with worse than Procrustean intolerance lopped, stretched, and mutilated the well-known facts of science, in the vain attempt to adapt them to the exigencies of a