Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/62

 48 FEEDINAND TONNIES : terminological instrument, which is to serve for the logical connexion of all possible concepts. It has been a com- pletely unintentional effect of the Kantian critique to make the rational idea of such an instrument as much an object of scorn, as scholasticism had become through Descartes and his followers ; so that (two generations after Wolff) Hegel wrote that what twenty-five years ago was called Metaphysic had been utterly rooted out and had vanished from the series of sciences thus, he thinks " the extraordinary spectacle has been produced of a cultivated people without a Metaphysic like a temple greatly adorned, but without its holy of holies ". Since then Hegel has met with almost the same fate as Wolff before him, and as the Aristotelians before Wolff or may we regard the present study of the Dialectic in English and American Universities as a new resurrection, if not of speculative philosophy, yet of that holy of holies ? which in truth the oracle of the Delphian god has com- manded to man, since theoretical self-knowledge is to elaborate and transform in ourselves the thoughts of humanity, and to know what we do when we judge and speak in concepts. It is certainly remarkable that of the three predominant systematic philosophies which, after Hegel, renewed upon an empirical basis the problem " de faire une specialite des generalites," the first regarded Metaphysic only as a bastard between theology and science (Cotnte), the second again derives the principles of a synthetic philosophy from the " ultimate data of con- sciousness," i.e. from the laws of thought (Spencer), and the most recent, though like the two former completely rooted in the natural sciences, finds a peculiar problem of Metaphysic in its endeavour to extend the connexion of facts according to the principle of ground and consequence to the totality of all given experience ; and finally co- ordinates ontological ideas of unity with cosmological and psychological (Wundt), which opens the prospect for a new elaboration of all transcendental concepts. 83. (D) The Philosophy of to-day, and hence also the unity and clearness of terminology, have as it were to fight backwards owing to the way being blocked by the imputation of being unscientific which attaches to Metaphysic ; while on the other hand they meet with the hindrances which all scientific thought must experience anew from traditional doctrines and opinions which are held to be sacred and necessary. And though these obstacles have had, and still have, their historically greatest significance when opposed to the de- spiritualised view of nature, still at the present time they