swered by the sense tests with which I am dealing."

This sort

of investigation is fair; it is honest and necessary in this age of specialties, but it is a case in which the investigator consents not to know many another road to truth. His compensation is in the fact that he may travel this road further, and become a pioneer and an authority. This spirit, on the whole, is of large advantage to the world; but so frequently a specialty becomes a by-way--a path in the woods leading nowhere. No specialist can be reliable in his chosen field after he has failed to acquire at second hand the world's constant product of related truth in other fields. He can make no progress after he does that which

truth never does-breaks connection.

One of the greatest incidental things about the spirit of true investigation to-day is that it is not afraid of a fact. A fact made evident through the senses is accepted with all its consequences. Facts made clear to consciousness are also accepted with their consequences. And if the whole world of phenomena, physical and spiritual, shall appear as final proof that God is a sovereign in the thought and life of man, that will be accepted. If the data of history have so accumulated as to give evidence of the reality of an undying religious principle in man, that is accepted. If there is an inside intuitive testimony to the infinite, let the fact stand and give it a chance to quadrate with every other known fact, and let the outcome be as it may. Let the shadowy and unreliable be eliminated and cast out, whether in the spiritual or the physical. Deal with a mystery in the spiritual world as fairly as with the same thing in the physical, for the mysteries of both spheres are the mysteries of philosophy.. To refuse investigation because of the mystery and doubt hanging about the subject would be to overturn every thing and leave no ground of confidence anywhere. The mysteries of the universe are the feeders of the mind. They constitute the stored capital of the unwasting centuries. are invitations to the intellect to grow and live forever.

They

So, then, the term science is not to be handicapped for the exclusive use of any scholar or any school. It is the broad term to include all the knowledges. There is a science of matter! There is a science of life! There is a science of mind! There is a science of spirit! There is a science of God!

So also, in the second place, limits have been put on the term

philosophy. It is the province of true philosophy to furnish the mind with truth through every possible agency. It is not, as Comte thinks, limited to the consideration of the physical sciences. All departments of human knowledge are equally open to the tests of philosophy, and its conclusions are as reasonable in one place as in another, because its processes are only incidentally different as applied anywhere. Philosophy is not exclusive of any field of investigation, but inclusive of all. There are philosophers who limit themselves to certain fields of inquiry; but philosophy is not limited. Philosophy has a cleavage to run from beginning to end of all manner of investigations, and it utterly refuses to be put into the leading-strings of any special intellectual method. Some are fond of saying, "The ultimate we do not know ;" and they have been trying to teach philosophy this shibboleth; but if in one way God may not be known, it is the very business of philosophy to institute search elsewhere. There shall be no monopolies in this kingdom of mind.

Philosophy has been defined as "the search after wholes; by another, as "the search for a first cause;" by another, as "the feeling after the absolute being." Schlegel defines it as "the science of consciousness alone." Plato defines it as "the intuition of unity." Another has defined it "as the pursuit of the highest truth." Bradford defines it as "the search for God." So a larger number of definitions would reveal an equally apparent confusion on the face of things; and they might make for philosophy still greater divergent paths; but they would go to enforce the fact that philosophy is not to be confined to any special method of investigation. True philosophy is right reason applied to any thing. Philosophy travels all roads, explores all regions, is the autocrat of all intellectual methods, and is equally at home every-where. It has no limitations but that of the mind's power to find the real.

With an inquisitorial and fearless spirit it goes out in search of the truth, for its end is universal truth. Its business is to enter the natural kingdom and compare all its known facts and draw conclusions. It is to walk among the spiritual forces and make inquiry with the calmness of an inherent right. It is to put all truth together, to show the coherence of all facts, and put into them their meaning. Aristotle says:

4-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. VIII.

It is not a question of preference with us whether we philosophize or not; it is the normal, rational process. It is in the nature of mind to reason of things and their end. Philosophy is operative anywhere; it is the common element; it is the chord of similitude binding into one category the widest range of pursuits, and it fills Plato's definition that it is the intuition of unity. Its limit is the outer boundary of the human understanding. What is man? What constitutes his powers? Whence comes such a being? Why is he here? Where is he going? What

is to become of him? What is this vast universe about him? What was its cause-when its beginning-its end? How is it controlled? How is man related to it and the manifest power behind it? What are the destinies of all this we see about us? This is the field and province of philosophy.

Sound philosophy has declared from the beginning that the facts of religion are on an immutable basis. The fundamental problems of religion have always been among the important, if not the most important, problems of life. But religion begins with God and his attributes, and the world has never lost interest in the search for clearer apprehensions of him. The data of religion make up many of the facts of history, which are the facts of reason, the facts of revelation, the facts of intuition and consciousness, and so numberless and strong are they that they can never be overthrown. The fact of virtue, the fact of vice, the fact of moral government, the fact of happiness, the fact of sorrow, the fact of existence itselfthese are as plain as the facts of daylight and darkness, and the building constructed without them had better look well to the corners and sides of its foundation. The movement of this life through its course means something more than attention to physical facts.

Special methods may address the understanding, and in them are the applications of sound philosophy; but indeed does this sort of business catalogue the apprehensive powers. It is apparent to the broadest scholarship of to-day that there must be brought about a larger appreciation of the vital relationship existing between the great departments of special research.

We can illustrate this necessity in a couple of cases. The student of material forms sees now much where before appeared nothing. There is such order and harmony and such magnitude of law in the minutest test he applies that he is bewildered whenever he comes to any sort of generalization, and

of course he has no relish for it. He sees, what the tyro never sees, that the human mind is not able to grasp the immensity of things; so the cosmos in such a system as this appears to be out of his reach. It is not strange that he should call it the unknowable; by which he means that the great first cause cannot be apprehended by the physical forces or by the senses; and by it also he means that the limitations of man's mental life preclude his having more than the most meager knowledge of the unconditioned. How can he understand the Creator when he is bewildered with the fact that he will never be able to master more than a small part of the small forces about him? He has only been able to make a toilsome journey into the rim of his own territory. He sees there pygmy forces relative to the unconditioned, but of such vast power and extent when compared with himself that he is prone to turn about and ascribe to them infinite causation. The poor man is bewildered. He has cut loose all the leading-strings of life but one, and he has followed it into a forest, and he is alone. It is not good for man to be alone. He needs to marry philosophy. She will even court him if he will be won, and she will teach him through the rest of his life in the law of relationships, so that he will not always see as through a glass darkly.

On the other hand, the mind that has been attracted first and most strongly with the intelligent and providential forces becomes not only absorbed in but captured by his method. He finds in it remarkable properties for giving an account of things. He thinks of himself as a truth-gatherer, and its methods are delightful to him. In the study of intelligent causes and of moral government he finds vast measures of enrapturing truth, and he concludes after a while that all clear intellectual vision must be from his vantage-ground. The doctrine of God to him is a vast study. He sees conflict of thought, but he is not alarmed at it. Opposing views he is able to interpret frequently as estimates made from opposite sides of the same wonderful truth. He says that he knows God, and also with Job he says, we cannot "find out the Almighty to perfection." He is not abashed that the data of his field ranges the entire cosmos, because while much lies beyond his understanding it yet remains to him an invitation.

But the peculiar liability of this student of intelligent forces

is that in the blessedness of his communions he is likely to underestimate the value of a sound philosophical method. He does not see that even true philosophy must confirm every step he takes, and that his greatest conclusions are only secure in that they become philosophic finalities. In the exuberance of his feeling he is disposed to miss the force of the great truth, that the rational nature of the kind of truths with which he is dealing is capable of being made as clear as the rational nature of physical truth, and it is his business to make them clear. He must see that the freightage of his acquisitions is not side-tracked for want of enthronement in the reason of man.

The student who is given to details is not always prepared for an insight into this common scheme of things which constitutes one system. So philosophy, in its broadest sense, keeps science from gloom and disappointment in showing the affinity of all facts, their contrasts, their eternal co ordinations. Its purpose is to correct and clarify and lead human thought into safe moorings. It entices all specialty of scholarship into broad and clear views of life. It takes knowledge of a particular kind, and helps it by putting it into contrasts and harmonies with that which is very unlike it in character. It puts itself against the empirical spirit every-where. It puts the calmness of honest inquiry on the face of the thinker, and helps him to recognize truth from all points of the intellectual compass. Raphael painted a picture of true philosophy when he drew a vaulted causeway with two principal figures in it. One was Aristotle, pointing forward; the other was Plato, pointing upward.

Williams Riley Halstead