Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/140

124 succeeded a generation which is more than ever tormented by the mystery of things and attracted by the ideal; and which dreams of social fraternity, of self-renunciation, of devotion to the weak, the miserable, the oppressed, even to the extent of the heroism of Christian love." In truth, in spite of the widespread and absorbing interest of men in material growth and prosperity, there was never before an age in which the feelings of men were more profoundly stirred or more powerfully elicited by the effort to realize their ideals. Neither of the two worlds, the sensible and the supersensible, has ceased to influence the thinking and the conduct of humanity. Neither of the two conceptions as to the Being of the World, that which claims to rest upon a scientific basis and that which aims to afford satisfaction to the demands for a reality of the Ideal, has been able to drive the other wholly from the confiding assurance of the human mind. And yet, from the point of view of him who accepts the Kantian theory of knowledge, the worlds in which the being of man is set continue to appear as an irreconcilable &#39;two&#39;. It is interesting at this point to notice how the English thinker whose death marked almost exactly the close of the first hundred years after the death of Kant, attempted to bring together the two spheres of science and of the religious ideal. But it can scarcely be claimed that the agnosticism of Mr. Spencer has proved any more acceptable to the religious party, or his reconciliation any more convincing to the scientific party, than were the agnosticism and the reconciling hypothesis of the Kantian critique.

May it not then be said that the peculiar sphere of philosophy,—at least, that in which its most appropriate movement should take place at the present time,—is that in which the rational union of the two worlds may somehow be sought and found? Or, to place the definition of the task of philosophy before us in somewhat different terms, let us take notice of the two classes of judgments which the mind forms, criticises, and rejects or maintains, as belonging to the different sides or aspects of its total experience. There are, first, the judgments about facts and generalizations from these facts,—the formulas, or so-called laws, which experience discovers as regulating the relations of