Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/378

368 assumption, that knowledge comes from the senses, did not suffice to explain experience. Man's mind is endowed with certain forms or principles of synthesis, by means of which the sense-material is organized into knowledge. Vernunft is the faculty whereby such principles may be apprehended. It implies a higher range and a deeper insight than Verstand. This superior faculty, in combination with an amplified reading of Herder's theory of historical evolution, was to be responsible for much, as we shall see in the sequel.

Herder, a younger contemporary of Kant, turned away from the mathematico-physical sciences, to which nearly all great intellects had been attracted for two centuries, and entered enthusiastically upon the study of the history of culture, of culture in the spacious sense of civilization. Even in this line of research, he can not be called an exact student. But his was a vitalizing personality, and so, his limitations notwithstanding, he originated the evolutionary and organic idea which may be termed appropriately the nineteenth century standpoint. He took particular delight in poetry, religion, language and the like. As early as 1767, he enunciated the conception which was to create historical science. "There is the same law of change in all mankind and in every individual, nation and tribe. From the bad to the good, from the good to the better and best, from the best to the less good, from the less good to the bad—this is the circle of all things. So it is with art and science; they grow, blossom, ripen and decay. So it is with language also." In the realm of the human spirit, all things work together; "history leads us into the council of fate, teaches us the eternal laws of human nature and assigns us our own place in that great organism in which reason and goodness. . . must create order."

At this point we strike the psychological moment when the conditions that led to the conflict between science and philosophy were assembling. Evidently, the center of gravity of philosophical inquiry would be shifted from the old mathematico-physical parallelism, if a professed philosopher were to appear equipped with the insight and speculative daring requisite to unite Kant's conception of Vernunft with Herder's fruitful suggestion, that history is a vast organism 'in which reason must create order.' This epoch-making thinker did arise, in the person of Hegel. We can not stay to outline the Hegelian system, but must rest content to state its germinal idea. Following upon Herder's pregnant thought, Hegel conceived of the universe as a single unity, inspired and controlled by a principle of reason, a principle in and through and for which everything has being. Obviously, if the human mind can grasp such a principle, Kant's faculty of Vernunft is the one power endowed with the necessary ability. As obviously, on these conditions, if a thinker can pick out, as it were, the rational