Or, again, the Positive Philosophy exhibits as one of its features an emphatic and popular statement of a fallacy much discussed in Hegel. One of the best deeds of that school has been to protest against a delusive belief in certain words and notions; particularly by pointing out the insufficiency of what it calls metaphysical terms, i. e. those abstract entities formed by reflective thought, which are little else than a double of the phenomenon they are intended to explain. To account for the existence of insanity by an assumed basis for it in the 'insane neurosis,' or to attribute the sleep which follows a dose of opium to the soporific virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated examples of the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in much of our popular, and even of our esoteric science. Positivism by its logical precepts ought at least to have instilled general distrust of abstract talk about essences, laws, forces and causes, whenever they claim an inherent and independent value, or profess to be more than a reflex of sensation. But all this is only a desultory perception, the reflection of an intelligent observer. When we come to Hegel, the Comtian perception of the danger lying in the terms of metaphysics is replaced by the Second Part of Logic, the Theory of Essential Being, where substances, causes, forces, essences, matters, are confronted with what Mr. Bain has called their 'suppressed correlative[16].' [Footnote 1: Aus Schellings Leben (Plitt.), ii. 161.] [Footnote 2: Hegel's _Briefe_, ii. 377.] [Footnote 3: _Phenomenologie des Geistes,_ p. 9.] [Footnote 4: Cf. Notes and Illustrations in vol. ii. 396, and chapter iii. of the _Logic._] [Footnote 5: Jacobi's _Werke_, v. 79, III, 115, 417.] [Footnote 6: Ibid., i. 178.] [Footnote 7: Jacobi's _Werke,_ iv. i. Abth. p. 55 seqq.] [Footnote 8: Jacobi's _Werke_, iv. i, p. xxi.] [Footnote 9: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel,_ i. 330.] [Footnote 10: Jacobi's _Werke_, iii. 53.] [Footnote 11: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel_, ii. 468.] [Footnote 12: Hegel's _Werke,_ i. 15.] [Footnote 13: Hegel's _Vermischte Schriften,_ i. 50.] [Footnote 14: Compare pages 121-142 of the _Logic._] [Footnote 15: _Phenomenologie des Geistes_, p. 54 (_Werke_, ii).] [Footnote 16: _Practical Essays,_ p. 43.] CHAPTER VI. THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY.