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 fashion. Meanwhile we may remind those who demand of us an explanation of the appearance of mechanism, that, if the term be strictly taken, there need for spiritualism be no such appearance at all. The more completely we can interpret the world as a realm of ends the more completely the tables are turned upon naturalism. As this contends, in the words of Huxley, “for the gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity,” so that, for the gradual banishment of what we call inert stuff and directionless energy.

To see how the case stands let us recall the contrast between science and history just now referred to. The first effect of this contrast was the extragavant commonplace that history as unscientific had no interest for the philosopher. The final result may be the other extreme, that science as general and abstract has no interest for the philosopher; since he is concerned only with reality, and that is concrete and individual out and out. At any rate the thought of the last century made a very decided advance in this direction: in the course of it what were formerly called the descriptive or natural history sciences culminated in the philosophy of evolution, while abstract physics is lapsing, as we have seen, from its old supremacy as the mechanical philosophy to the rank of a merely descriptive scheme. As compared with the nineteenth century the eighteenth — though it produced great historians — was a century devoid of historic sense. Its speculations