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452 philosophy, whether materialistic or idealistic. The modern upholders of the critical idea of philosophy, if they insist on anything, insist on the radical difference between the critical and historical method of philosophising. We shall see that it is just M. de Roberty's tendency to treat all philosophy as merely a historical phenomenon, which makes the reader feel that his book is illuminative and expository rather than convincing and judicial.

What M. de Roberty charges philosophers of our own and of all time with doing is the confusing of philosophy with special science. He certainly succeeds in showing that there has been very much of this, and also that the reigning conceptions of philosophy are influenced by this illusory idea. Science gradually absorbs ground from philosophy which too long and too often simply built illusory hypotheses on the unexplored regions of sense; physics and biology are both realms which science took from philosophy by offering an exact instead of a hypothetical treatment of them, and psychology too is now on the way to becoming an exact science. In the means, in short, that philosophy has used to attain the philosophical end — that of finality in our conceptions — it has been wrong; the methods leading to an analytic knowledge of nature do not necessarily lead to a synthetic knowledge. M. de Roberty of course does not imagine that philosophy can be independent of science; he holds, he says, to the idea of the general equivalence of science and philosophy, while disbelieving altogether in the equivalence of the philosophical and scientific constructions of the world as they have appeared in history. The true scientific philosophy has not yet arisen, because there are yet gaps in the whole of knowledge.

Are we then to hold that only a completed science can be a complete philosophy? We are apt to ask this in reading the book, for our author is always able to point out that such and such a state of science results in such and such a conception of the world; indeed, he calls this fact the supreme law of philosophical evolution. The strength of the book lies in its successful presentation of the evolution of nineteenth century philosophy in its relation to the history and problem of philosophy in general, and in the criticism it offers especially of Positivism and of Evolution. M. de Roberty's real idea of philosophy is that it ought to banish from its sphere all special problems, and that it ought to be the general systematization of the sciences or their co-ordination in view of a single end: a single integral conception of the world would be a final conception, and the conception of finality should lose its old teleological signification. We are still to-day in the theological phase of thinking, and cannot immediately hope to find the scientific philosophy; modern agnosticism is a sleeping stage of thought. Philosophy will be a systematic arrangement of the teaching of science without the use of