But there is a profound difference between the spirit of a Philosophy of Nature and the aggregate of the physical sciences. Each science takes the particular quarry which accident or providence has assigned to it, and does its best to 'put out' every piece of rock it contains. But it seldom goes, unless by constraint, and in these days of specialisation it does so less and less, to examine the neighbouring excavation, and see if there be any connexion between the strata. Even within its own domain it is ashamed to put forward too much parade of system. Its method is often like that of the showman in the travelling menagerie: 'And now, please pass to the next carriage.' It respects the compartmental arrangement into which it finds the world broken up, and often thinks it has deserved well if it has filled the compartment fuller than before, or succeeded in creating a few sub-compartments within the old bounds. Even the so-called mental and moral sciences when they lose their philosophical character tend to imitate these features. Yet in every science there is an outlook and an outlet, for whosoever has the will and the power, to emerge from his narrow domain on the open fields and free prospect into the first fountains and last great ocean of being. Always, and not least in our own day, the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, and the economist, have made their special field a platform where they might discourse de omnibus rebus, and become for the nonce philosophers and metaphysicians. It would be a silly intolerance and a misconception of the situation to exclaim Ne sutor ultra crepidam. In the organic system of things 'each "moment" even independent of the whole is the whole; and to see this is to penetrate to the heart of the thing.' We need hardly go to Hegel to be told that to know one thing thoroughly well is to know all things. The finite, which we inertly rest content with, would, if we were in full sympathy with it, open up its heart and show us the infinite. And yet if the specialist when he rises from his shoe-making, with a heart full of the faith that 'there is nothing like leather,' should proclaim his discovery of it in regions where it was hitherto unsurmised, one may smile incredulous and be no cynic.
Philosophy then keeps open eye and ear—as far as may be no doubt for the finer shades and delicate details—but essentially for the music of humanity and the music of the spheres—for the general purpose and drift of all sciences—from mathematics to sociology—as they help to make clear the life of nature and further the emancipation of man. It will seem occasionally to over-emphasise the continuity of science and to make light of its distinctions: it will seem occasionally more anxious as to the order than as to the contents of the sciences: it will remind the sciences of the hypothetical and formal character of much of their method and some of their principles: and sometimes will treat as unimportant, results on which the mere scholar or dogmatist of science lays great weight. From his habit of dealing with the limitations and mutual implication of principles and conceptions, the philosopher will often be able—and perhaps only too willing—to point out cases where the mere specialist has allowed himself to attribute reality to his abstraction. He will tell the analyst of the astronomical motions that he must not take the distinction of centrifugal and centripetal force, into which mechanics disintegrate the planetary orbit, as if it really meant that the planet was pulled inward by one force and sent on spinning forward by another[8]. And the scientist, proud of his mathematics, will resent and laugh at the philosopher who lets fall a word about the planets moving in grand independence like 'blessed gods.' The philosopher will hint to the chemist that his formulae of composition and decomposition of bodies are, as he uses them, somewhat mythological, picturing water as atom of oxygen locked up with atom of hydrogen; and the chemist will go away muttering something about a fool who does not believe in the well-ascertained chemical truth that water is composed of these two gases. If the philosopher further hints that it is not the highest ideal of a chemical science to be content with enumerating fifty or sixty elements, and detecting their several properties and affinities[9]; that it would be well to find some principle of gradation, some unity or law which brought meaning into meaningless juxtaposition, the mere dogmatist, whose chemistry is his living and who shrinks from disendowment, will scent a propensity towards the heresy which sinks all elements in one. And yet, even among chemists, the instinct for law and unity begins to demand satisfaction.
A still richer store of amazing paradox and perplexing analogies awaits anyone who will turn over the volume in Hegel's Werke (vii. i) and select the plums which lie thick in the lecture-notes. He will find a great deal—and probably more, the less he really knows of any of the subjects under discussion—that he cannot make head or tail of: language where he cannot guess whether it should be taken literally or figuratively. For Hegel seriously insists on the essential unity and identity of all the compartments of the physical universe; he will not keep time and space on one level, matter and motion on another, and senses, suns, plants, passions, all in their proper province. Going far beyond the theory which supposes that all the complex difference of organisation has grown up in endless, endless ages from a primitive indistinctness, so that the gap of time acts as a wall to keep early and late apart, Hegel insists upon their essential unity to-day. And that sounds hard—the herald of anarchy, of the collapse of the ordered polity of the scientific state. It is no doubt probable that Hegel, like other men, made mistakes; that he over-estimated the supposed discoveries of the day: that he indulged in false analogies, and that he was attracted by a daring paradox. All this has nothing to do with his main thesis: which is, that the natural realm is as it stands an a-logical realm where reason has gone beside itself, and yet containing an instrument—man, and that is mind—by which its rationality may be realised and restored. In that point at least he and Schopenhauer are at one.
[1] Kant's Kritik d. r. Vernunft: Methodenl. Architektonik d. r. Vern.
[2] Schelling's Werke, v. 116.
[3] Ibid. v. 276.
[4] Ibid. iii. 267.
[5] Kant, Kritik d. r. Vern., Deduction of the Categories, Sect. III.
[6] Encyclopaedie, § 250.