of nothing, the world of the infinitely small. Within a generation or two biology has been created; and physics, chemistry, and geology have been born again. The first wave of astonishment and delight at these great revelations has been succeeded by one of perplexity and doubt in the presence of the wholly new problems that they raise. The old self-assurance is lost. Men first stumble, blinded by the new and unaccustomed light, and then despair. The age of the faith and assured conviction of Aquinas was followed by the bold and cynical scepticism of Montaigne; and this in turnfor scepticism has never afforded a restingplace for the human spirit for more than a moment has yielded to the philosophy of disenchantment and despair of a Schopenhauer and the morbidly acute and unsatisfying selfanalysis of an Amiel. Already it is proclaimed by Nordau and his school that we are in an age of decadence, and that many of our contemporary interpreters of life and thought-Wagner, Tolstoi, Ibsen, Zola, the pre-Raphaelites—are fit subjects for an insane ayslum. Mankind is divided into warring camps, and while electricity and steam have bound the nations of the earth together, questions of knowledge and of belief have split up every nation into sects. Hegel and In all this tumult it is difficult to catch the sound of the dominant note. Each suggested interpretation seems to lead us further into the tangled maze, where we cannot see the wood for the trees. Standards of truth are more definite than ever before; but standards of worth are strangely confused, and at times even their existence is denied. Amid all this confusion, however, a light has been growing steadily brighter for those who have eyes to see. In our own century two great masters of thought have come forward, offering, like Ariadne of old, to place in our hands the guiding thread that shall lead us through the labyrinth-the German Hegel and the Englishman Herbert Spencer. And as the nineteenth century closes, amid the din of other and lesser voices, we seem to hear the deeper tones of these two interpreters swelling forth as representative of the best and most earnest endeavors, from two totally different points of view, of human seekers after light. Each has taken the whole of knowledge for his province, each has spread out before us a connected view of man and his environment, and each would These great teachers typify the catholicity and the scientific method that are so characteristic of the best expressions of our modern civilization. Whatever of insight we have gained into history, into philosophy, into art, and into nature, they have incorporated in their systematic thinking and have endeavored to illumine with the light of their controlling principles. Hegel, schooled in the teachings of Kant and of Fichte, and coming early to an appreciation of the seed-thought of Plato and Aristotle, Bruno and Spinoza, has taught us in unmistakable language that independent, self-active being is the father of all things. Spencer, feeling the thrill of that unity which makes the cosmos one, and receiving from Lamarck and Von Baer the hint that led him to see that the life of the individual furnishes the clew to the understanding of the life of the aggregate, whether natural or social, has formulated into a single and understandable law of progress the terms of that development, or evolution, which has been more or less dimly before the mind of man since thought began. The German with his principle of self-activity, and the Englishman with his law of evolution, offer us a foothold for our knowledge and our faith, and assure us that it will safely support them. The primacy of reflective thought From the one we learn the eternal reasonableness of all that is or can be, while the other teaches us the character of the process by which the visible universe, that every day presents new wonders to our gaze, has been builded out of the primeval star-dust. At their hands the two sublime and awe-inspiring verities of Kant-the starry heavens above and the moral law within-find their places in the life of the spirit, and together testify to its eternity and its beauty. Despite the fact that our age is one of unexampled scientific and industrial progress, yet nothing in all our modern scientific activity is more striking than the undisputed primacy of thought-thought not in antagonism to sense, but interpretative of the data of sense. Idealism, shorn of its crudities and its extravagances, and based on reason rather than on Berkeley's analysis of sense-perception, is conquering the world. What Plato saw, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel have demonstrated. The once-dreaded materialism has lost all its terrors. Science itself has analyzed matter into an aggregate of dynamical systems, and speaks of energy in terms of will. The seemingly inert stone that we grasp in our hand is in reality an aggregate of an infinite number of rapidly moving centres of energy. Our own will is the only energy of whose direct action we are immediately conscious, and we use our experience of it to explain other manifestations of energy to ourselves. Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space. The very instants of the beginnings of the sun's eclipses are predicted for centuries and æons to come. Sirius, so distant that the light from its surface, travelling at a rate of speed that vies with the lightning, requires more than eight and one-half years to reach us, is weighed, and its constituents are counted almost as accurately as are the bones of our bodies. Yet in 1842 Comte declared that it was forever impossible to hope to determine the chemical composition or the mineralogical structure of the stars. An unexpected aberra tion in the motions of Uranus foretold an undiscovered planet at a given spot in the sky, and the telescope of Galle, turned to that precise point, revealed to the astonished senses what was certain to thought. But yesterday a discrepancy in the weight of nitrogen extracted from the air we breathe, led Lord Rayleigh, by an inexorable logic, to the dis |