Thus the recent products of English thought have been, as Mr. Spencer has taught us to say, partly in the line of differentiation, partly of integration. At one moment it seems as if the ancient queen of the sciences sat like Hecuba, _exul, inops,_ while her younger daughters enjoyed the freedom and progress of specialisation. The wood seems lost behind the trees. And at another, again, the centripetal force seems to preponderate: every department, logic, ethics, psychology, sociology, rapidly carries its students on and up to fundamental questions, if not to fundamental principles. Philosophy--the one and undivided truth and quest of truths--emerges fresh, vigorous, and as yet rather indeterminate, from the mass of detailed investigations. That the position is now altered from what it was in times when knowledge had fewer departments, is obvious. The task of the 'synoptic' mind--which Plato claims for the philosopher--grows increasingly difficult: but that is hardly a reason for performing it in a more perfunctory way. It seems rather as if in such a crisis one of the great reconstructive systems of a preceding age might be in some measure helpful. If we consult history, it is at once clear that philosophy, or the pursuit of ultimate reality and permanent truth, went hand in hand with scientific researches into facts and their particular explanations. In their earlier stages the two tendencies of thought were scarcely distinguishable. The philosophers of Ionia and Magna Graecia were also the scientific pioneers of their time. Their fragmentary remains remind us at times of the modern theories of geology and biology,--at other times of the teachings of idealism. The same thing is comparatively true of the earlier philosophers of Modern Europe. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in spite of Bacon and Newton, endeavoured to study the mental and moral life by a method which was a strange mixture of empiricism and metaphysics. In words, indeed, the thinkers from Descartes to Wolff duly emphasise, perhaps over-emphasise, the antithesis between the extended and the intellectual. But in practice their course is not so clear. Their mental philosophy is often only a preliminary _medicina mentis_ to set the individual mind in good order for undertaking the various tasks awaiting a special research. They are really eager to get on to business, and only, as it were, with regret spend time in this clearance of mental faculty. And when they do deal with objects, the material and extended tends to become the dominant conception, the basis of reality. The human mind, that _nobilissima substantia_, is treated only as an aggregate, or a receptacle, of ideas, and the _mens_,--with them all nearly as with Spinoza,--is only an _idea corporis,_ and that phrase not taken so highly as Spinoza's perhaps should be taken. In the works of these thinkers, as of the pre-Socratics, there is one element which may be styled philosophical,