But there is a profound difference between the spirit of a Philosophy of Nature and the aggregate of the physical sciences. Each science takes the particular quarry which accident or providence has assigned to it, and does its best to 'put out' every piece of rock it contains. But it seldom goes, unless by constraint, and in these days of specialisation it does so less and less, to examine the neighbouring excavation, and see if there be any connexion between the strata. Even within its own domain it is ashamed to put forward too much parade of system. Its method is often like that of the showman in the travelling menagerie: 'And now, please pass to the next carriage.' It respects the compartmental arrangement into which it finds the world broken up, and often thinks it has deserved well if it has filled the compartment fuller than before, or succeeded in creating a few sub-compartments within the old bounds. Even the so-called mental and moral sciences when they lose their philosophical character tend to imitate these features. Yet in every science there is an outlook and an outlet, for whosoever has the will and the power, to emerge from his narrow domain on the open fields and free prospect into the first fountains and last great ocean of being. Always, and not least in our own day, the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, and the economist, have made their special field a platform where they might discourse _de omnibus rebus,_ and become for the nonce philosophers and metaphysicians. It would be a silly intolerance and a misconception of the situation to exclaim _Ne sutor ultra crepidam_. In the organic system of things 'each "moment" even independent of the whole is the whole; and to see this is to penetrate to the heart of the thing.' We need hardly go to Hegel to be told that to know one thing thoroughly well is to know all things. The finite, which we inertly rest content with, would, if we were in full sympathy with it, open up its heart and show us the infinite. And yet if the specialist when he rises from his shoe-making, with a heart full of the faith that 'there is nothing like leather,' should proclaim his discovery of it in regions where it was hitherto unsurmised, one may smile incredulous and be no cynic.