Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/541

Rh makes when, after having studied all the sciences, he realizes that no one can attain knowledge without plunging into the reality of life. Yet we do not believe that philosophy has forfeited the glory that is due to every sincere effort, in whatever order of research. It was necessary, indispensable, and certain, that reason, escaping the limits of things, should exhaust itself in tentatives. Did not Plato of necessity create Aristotle, and stoicism Lucretius, in the same way that Bacon and Descartes, Galileo and Kant, were born of scholastic and dogmatic thought?

Philosophy (I am not speaking of speculative philosophy this time) now comprehends that it can aspire to fill only two missions: to be the synthesis of all our knowledge, and to generalize the method which ascends from facts to ideas, persuaded that the idea springs from the fact and does not create it. In this sense philosophy, suffering modifications as time goes on, will be always the synthesis of the known (not of the knowable), and, freed from that which is of speculation and ideology, will remain the guardian mistress of the harmony in which the true, the beautiful, and the good are to be blended.

Thus there remains a task for philosophy that peculiarly belongs to it—one of the noblest tasks—to examine the solidity of the bases of morals, independently of customs and the prejudices of individual nations and times; and ethics is not separable from aesthetics. So understood, philosophy is the science of sciences, or absolutely the science, the guarantee of progress, the guardian of morals, the mediator between science and art, the supreme expression of liberty of thought which admits neither innate ideas nor revelation. We comprehend everything under the ægis of such a philosophy, precisely because method has become single.

The long-cherished contrast between the positive and historical sciences has disappeared, for we are persuaded that the point of departure in this also is observation, that the continuity of facts must be followed step by step in seeking out the law, in tracing the concatenation, in order to rise to the conception that all has become what it was necessary for it to become. Harmony in the universe is inherent to the beginning of things; and if we could embrace them in a single glance we should see that first causes correspond with final causes; and teleology and causality would be merely the two faces of the same medal.

Unity of method conduces to the union of the exact sciences and of historical investigations, of jurisprudence and anthropology, of biology and military art, of politics and statistics. From this marriage have been born the social sciences, which have come to demonstrate that society has its evolution, its exigencies, its diseases, and, in short, its laws like the individual, and that it is necessary to calculate facts and observe their march in order to