But, what about the special relationship of philosophy to the sciences? Undoubtedly the philosophers of the early years of the century have used lordly language in reference to the sciences. They have asserted--from Fichte downwards--that the philosophical construction, of the universe must justify itself to itself--must be consistent, continuous, and coherent--and that it had not to wait for experience to give it confirmation. Even the cautious Kant[5] had gone so far as to assert that the 'understanding gives us nature'--i. e. as he explains, _natura formaliter spectata_, viz., the order and regularity in the phenomena--that it is the source of the laws of nature and of its formal unity. The so-called proofs of natural laws are only instances and exemplifications, which no more _prove_ them, than we prove that 6 x 4 = 24, because 6 yards of cloth at 4s. must be paid for by 24 shillings. To assert that this instance is no proof, is not to reject experience--still less to refuse respect to the new discoveries of science. But it is unquestionably to assert that there is something prior to the sciences--prior, i. e. in the sense that Kant speaks of the _a priori,_ something which is fundamental to them, and constitutes them what they are--something which is assumed as real if their syntheses (and every scientific truth is a synthesis) are to be possible. The analysis and exhibition in its organic completeness of this Kantian _a priori_ is the theme of the Hegelian Logic. The Philosophy of Nature stands in the Hegelian system between Logic and Mental or Spiritual Philosophy. Man--intelligent, moral, religious and artistic man--rests upon the basis of natural existence: he is the child of the earth, the offspring of natural organisation. But Nature itself--such is the hypothesis of the system--is only intelligible as the reflex of that _a priori_ which has been exhibited in Logic. The whole scheme by which the natural world is scientifically held together, apprehended by ordinary consciousness and elaborated by mathematical analysis, presupposes the organism of the categories--these fundamental habits of thought or form of conception which are the framework of the existence we know. Yet Nature never shows this intelligible world--the Idea--in its purity and entirety. In the half-literal, half-figurative phrases of Hegel, Nature shows the Idea beside itself, out of its mind, alienated, _non compos mentis._ 'It is a mad world, my masters,' 'The impotence of nature_--Ohnmacht der Natur_[6]--is a frequent phrase, by which he indicates the a-logical, if not illogical, character of the physical world. Here we come across the negation of mind: chance plays its part: contingency is everywhere. If you expect that the physical universe will _display_ unquestioning obedience to the laws of reason and of the higher logic, you will be disappointed. What you _see_ is fragmentary, chaotic, irregular. To the bodily sense--even when that sense has been