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286 most encyclopædic knowledge of externally presented objects, considered as such. But, vast as a philosophy of nature in this sense would be, it does not completely exhaust the possible conception of a philosophy of nature. For, even supposing nature as object, or as opposed to mind, were accurately summed up in a most "general" science, it would still have to be known as related to mind or thought; would have to be characterized in terms of pure thought, the sciences having described it only in terms of sense, either immediate or abstract. And the characterization of nature in terms of thought is just the work of the pure philosophy of nature. Such a characterization presupposes for its realization an accurate and most "general" knowledge of nature, in and by itself considered, or as object. It likewise presupposes the knowledge of the forms or functions of thought. Its office will be, or is, the synthesis of these sorts of knowledge, the reading into the highest truths of the sciences, those of pure mind, the transformation of the formulas of natural science into those of thought. (We may equally well say that it is virtually the transformation of the formulae of thought into those of nature: it is, as it were, the equating of the two.) This expression of the results of the natural sciences in terms of thought is a natural, necessary proceeding for thought, if it is to be a whole, to be without any internal lacuna destructive of its ideal integrity: it is but the completed realization of the meaning (not fully comprehended by Bacon) of the (Baconian) phrase, "the interpretation of nature." In accordance with the foregoing, the philosophy of nature may, in view of the fact that for common consciousness, and for natural science, even, nature and mind are opposed, be described as the reconciliation of nature with mind, or vice versa; a form of description, we may remark in passing, which suggests its vital relation to all interests involved in the real discussion of such a topic as the above-mentioned one, of the relation between science and religion.

From the foregoing it seems clear that for thought there is a philosophy of nature distinct from mere natural science, formerly dignified, especially in England and America, by the name "Natural Philosophy"; that natural science does not