Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/18

 synthesis lives and moulds opinion, even when its details are rejected and its conclusions are ignored. To put aside the ancients, Aristotle, Plato, and their derivative schools; to put aside the mediaeval logicians, Albert, Roger Bacon, Aquinas, all of whom constructed provisional and indeed illusory syntheses of a kind, under the dominant theology and metaphysics; to come to the moderns, we can only name with assurance Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel. Neither Francis Bacon, nor Hobbes, nor Locke, nor Hume, nor Diderot, nor Montesquieu, nor Bentham, Mill, or Hamilton, attempted what a true Synthesis demands a general co-ordination of all the sciences, a harmony of the moral and the physical worlds as we know them. Nor, in- our own generation, can I count more than two such schemes of general knowledge the Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, and the Evolutionary Philosophy of Herbert Spencer. It is no paradox that, in philosophy, a systematic co-ordination of ideas may ultimately be judged as abortive, and yet may remain one of the landmarks of human thought and a monument of human genius.

Consider the far-reaching and incalculable effects upon all subsequent thought of such fundamental conceptions as those of Bacon's Organum, Descartes' Meditations, Newton's Principia, Hume's Essays, Kant's Kritik, Darwin's Origin of Species. These effects are quite distinct from acceptance of the whole of these conceptions as irrefragable truth. An age which has dedicated its industry to infinitesimal analysis and an almost jealous specialism is too apt to slight the power of the imagination in the service of a great constructive brain. Philosophy, like poetry itself, can do nothing abiding without the synthetic imagination. To limit