Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/26

 range of our relative powers of mind. Any real synthesis of our knowledge of phenomena must be one relative to the powers of the human observation and reflection—not claiming to be any record of things as they are in the Universe. It is difficult to see how such a panorama of an objective world of things differs from the transcendental conception of 'Dinge an Sich.' The spectacle presented to our very limited powers of vision and of thought by such petty corner of the Unfathomable Universe as may be within our ken is still of itself so vast, so complex, so shifting, so subtle, and yet to us so infinite, that it must ever baffle our efforts to reach farther than a simple tabulation of what is within our range of mental vision. As well ask the painter of a grand landscape to draw, not what he sees from his standing-point, but every object which is actually present within the horizon—nay, beyond the horizon and every object, not in just perspective as visible to the human eye, but in its actual proportion to all other objects around it.

I must assume that those who hear me are familiar with the famous sixteen propositions in which Spencer, in many successive publications, formulated what he called 'the cardinal principles developed in his works.' It was 'that process of transformation going on throughout the Cosmos as a whole, and in each larger or smaller part of it.' They know too how the final definition of Evolution ran thus: &apos;Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from a relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.&apos; And the Telos of the entire Synthetic Philosophy, as I understand it, is