The sciences break up the rough generalisations or vulgar concepts of everyday use, and make their fixed distinctions yield to analysis. They thus render continuous things which were looked at as only separate. But they tend again to substitute the results of their analysis as a new and permanent distinction and principle of things. They are like revolutionists who upset and perturb an old order, and set up a new and minuter tyranny in its place. Gradually, the general culture, the average educated intelligence gathers up the fruit of scientific research into the total development of humanity: and uses the work of science to fill up the _lacunae,_ the gaps, which make popular consciousness so irregular and disconnected. A sort of popular philosophy comes to sum up and estimate what science has accomplished: and therein is as it were the spirit of the world taking into his own hand the acquisitions won by the more audacious and self-willed of his sons, and investing them in the common store. They are set aside and preserved there, at first in an abstract and technical form, but destined soon to pass into the possession of all, and form that mass of belief and instinctive or implanted knowledge whence a new generation will draw its mental supplies. Each great scientific discovery is in its turn reduced to a part of the common stock. It leaves the technical field, and spreads into the common life of men, becoming embodied in their daily beliefs,--a seed of thought, from which, by the agency of intelligent experience, new increments of science will one day spring. Philosophy properly so called is also the unification of science, but in a new sphere, a higher medium not recognised by the sciences themselves. The reconciliation which the philosopher believes himself to accomplish between ordinary consciousness and science is identified by either side with a phase of its antagonist error. Science will term philosophy a modified form of the old religious superstition. The popular consciousness of truth, and especially religion, will see in philosophy only a repetition or an aggravation of the evils of science. The attempt at unity will not approve itself to either, until they enter upon the ground which philosophy occupies, and move in that element. And that elevation into the philosophic ether calls for a tension of thought which is the sternest labour imposed upon man: so that the continuous action of philosophising has been often styled superhuman. If anywhere, it is in pure philosophy that proof becomes impossible, unless for those who are willing to think for themselves[5]. The philosophic lesson cannot be handed on to a mere recipient: the result, when cut off from the process which produced it, vanishes like the palace in the fairy tale.