Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/497

 496 S. ALEXANDEB I crystal for our sea, by which to allay its thirst, who can help feeling that they are much more intelligible in the ordinary theory of attraction ? And yet is not this very ' attraction ' full of poetry, and actually transferred from human interests to natural facts '? And is not the history of evolution itself a great epic, not without its tragic side the march of destiny in the natural world, and not without its touches of epic irony the great universal battle of frogs and mice ? Wherever science appears to be largest and truest it appears most poetical and most philosophical. However, I do not mean to apologise for Hegel or to defend him : my object is to represent his view of nature as simply as I can and, where I can do so, in my own way, without much use of Hegel's technicalities ; and secondly, I wish to point out" some of his merits and defects, and to show what bearing his conception may have on some current ideas. I. The Relation of Philosophy of Nature to Physics or Natural Science. 1 Physics, i.e., Natural Science, and the Philosophy of Nature deal with the same subject ; they differ only in their mode of thought. Science thinks nature, philosophy compre- hends it; science casts nature in the forms of the understand- ing, to philosophy nature is presented in the form of the Idea or Notion : hence the former is said to be a dcnlcrndc, the latter a begreifende, Betrachtung of nature. It is the out- come of physics, the mode of thinking which the mind is compelled to adopt by science itself. It can only begin when science has already achieved certain results : experi- ence must have been collected and laws discovered before philosophy begins, and it can continue only when checked by experience. The express declaration of Hegel to this effect 2 is sufficient to show the absurdity of supposing that his Philosophy of Nature is an a priori construction of ex- perience : it is only experience of nature transformed into thought, and therefore independent of merely individual experience. This relation of natural philosophy to natural science is repeated in all special philosophies, and in philosophy or metaphysics in general. They are often thought otiose because they do not precede but follow actual achievement. The philosophy of history requires to be preceded by an intelligent account of men and movements, which it uses as 1 Einleitung, pp. 7 ff. 2 Wallace's Logic of Hegel, pp. 15 ff. ; cp. Werke, vi.. pp. 18 ff.