once their increasing belief in the unity of things, and their increasing disbelief in its penetrability by our intelligence:-- _In's Innere der Natur, Dringt kein erschaffner Geist,_ is their chosen poet's expression of their philosophic mood. Curious we have the right to call this state of the scientific mind, because it is to critical reflection so certainly self-contradictory. How can there be a real unity belonging to what is inscrutable?--what evidence of unity can there be, except in intelligible and explanatory continuity? But, at all events, this very mood of agnostic self-contradiction, into which the development of the sciences casts such a multitude of minds, brings them,--brings all of us,--as already indicated, into that court of philosophy where alone such issues lawfully belong, and where alone they can be adjudicated. If the unification of the sciences can be made out to be real by making out its sole sufficient condition, namely, that there is a genuine, and not a merely nominal, unity in the whole of reality itself,--a unity that explains because it is itself, not simply intelligible, but the only completely intelligible of things,--this desirable result must be the work of philosophy. However difficult the task may be, it is rightly put upon us who belong to the Department listed first among the twenty-four in the programme of this representative Congress. I cannot but express my own satisfaction, as a member of this Department, nor fail to extend my congratulations to you who are my colleagues in it, that the Congress, in its programme, takes openly the affirmative on this question of the possible unification of knowledge. The Congress has thus declared beforehand for the practicability of the task it sets. It has even declared for its not distant accomplishment; indeed, not impossibly, its accomplishment through the transactions of the Congress itself; and it indicates, by no uncertain signs, the leading, the determining part that philosophy must have in the achievement. In fact, the authorities of the Congress themselves suggest a solution of their own for their problem. In their programme we see a renewed Hierarchy of the Sciences, and at the summit of this appears now again, after so long a period of humiliating obscuration, the figure of Philosophy, raised anew to that supremacy, as Queen of the Sciences, which had been hers from the days of Plato to those of Copernicus, but which she began to lose when modern physical and historical research entered upon its course of sudden development, and which, until recently, she has continued more and more to lose as the sciences have advanced in their career of discoveries,--ever more unexpected, more astonishing, yet more convincing and more helpful to the welfare of mankind. May this sign of her recovered empire not fail! If we rejoice at the token, the Congress has made it our part to see that the title is vindicated.