Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/143

127 and all their just claims to having received a most commendable 'finish' at the hands of the past, need perpetually to be wrought over anew. Each day and generation inherits from that past; but each day and generation must have its very own philosophy. Even the categories, in their most abstract and bloodless form, like the logical formulas of Aristotle and the axioms and postulates of Euclid, are by no means the same precisely for the thought of the twentieth century. If science is satisfied to build itself anew, if the new truths of fact and law do not admit of being built without considerable remodelling into the old structure, surely philosophy need neither complain nor be complained of, when it has a similar experience. The divine voice which summons it to its task, and which reveals to it its mission, is the declaration: "The former things are passing away. Behold I make all things new." And yet, just as the world is the same old world for physical science, so and more emphatically and instructively is human nature, with its demands for the deliverances of philosophy concerning the Being of the World, concerning God, freedom, and immortality, essentially the same as in the most ancient days.

The rapid growth of the physical sciences during the nineteenth century, and especially the important changes in the entire scientific point of view which occurred in the latter half of this century, for a time operated not only to increase the essential task, but to make more difficult the friendly and happy fulfilment of the mission of philosophy. But the last decade or two has shown plain signs of a fortunate reversal of expert opinion and of intelligent interest. As the scientific spirit and method invaded the fields of morals and religion,—whether as history, theory, or practice,—there was at one time a rather unfeeling and conscienceless disregard of the ethical and religious sentiments and ideals on the part of the new science; and there was either a rather weak and cowardly subservience, or a hardening of unreason and an increased feeling of bitterness, on the part of the old orthodoxy in ethics and theology. The two worlds either drew farther apart, or somewhat savagely ground together in that domain which always remains essentially one,—the totality of