By asserting the rights of philosophy against the dogmatism of self-inspired 'unphilosophy,' and by maintaining that we must not feel the truth, with our eyes as it were closed, but must open them full upon it, Hegel does not reduce philosophy to the level of one of the finite sciences. The name 'finite,' like the name 'empirical,' is not a title of which the sciences have any cause to be ashamed. They are called empirical, because it is their glory and their strength to found upon experience. They are called finite, because they have a fixed object, which they must expect and cannot alter; because they have an end and a beginning,--presupposing something where they begin, and leaving something for the sciences which come after. Botany rests upon the researches of chemistry: and astronomy hands over the record of cosmical movements to geology. Science is interlinked with science; and each of them is a fragment. Nor can these fragments ever, in the strict sense of the word, make up a whole or total. They have broken off, sometimes by accident, and sometimes for convenience, from one another. The sciences have budded forth here and there upon the tree of popular knowledge and ordinary consciousness, as the interest and needs of the time drew attention closer to various points and objects in the world surrounding us. Prosecute the popular knowledge about any point far enough, substituting completeness and accuracy for vagueness, and especially giving numerical definiteness in weight, size, and figure, until the little drop of fact has grown into an ocean, and the mere germ has expanded into a structure with complex interconnexion,--and you will have a science. By its point of origin this luminous body of facts is united to the great circle of human knowledge and ignorance. Each special science is a part, which presupposes a total of much lower organisation, but much wider range than itself: each branch of scientific knowledge grows out of the already existent tree of acquaintance with things. But the part very soon assumes an independence of its own, and adopts a hostile or negative attitude towards the general level of unscientific opinion. This process of what we may, from the vulgar point of view, call abnormal development, is repeated irregularly at various points along the surface of ordinary consciousness. At one time it is the celestial movements calling for the science of astronomy: at another the problem of dividing the soil calling for the geometrician. Each of these outgrowths naturally re-acts and modifies the whole range of human knowledge, or what we may call popular science; and thus, while keeping up its own life, it quickens the parent stock with an infusion of new vigour, and raises the general intelligence to a higher level and into a higher element.