Now, if this be accepted as a rough sketch of the actual course of the development of belief, what is the conclusion as to the philosopher's function? Does it go to suggest that philosophy is but a vanity and vexation of spirit, and does it reduce the philosopher to a humbler position than is sometimes claimed for him? My answer would be, in the first place, that the case against philosophy would have to be frankly admitted if the criterion sometimes tacitly suggested be the true one. Nothing could be more hopeless than the claim of any philosophy whatever to have laid down a definitively satisfactory plan of things in general. When Mr. Balfour observes that an Aristotle or Aquinas or Descartes has not laid down a tenable theory of the universe, I can only add that the very phrase--theory of the universe--conveys a sufficient refutation. It is idle, or worse than idle, to imagine that we can lay down, or even hope to lay down, anything of the kind. It needs only one of those glances into the surrounding infinities which I have suggested, or the briefest survey of the history of philosophy, to reveal the sheer impossibility of the attempt. No one, perhaps, ever quite imagined that his speculation could really lay bare the ultimate ground plan of things in general. But, certainly, philosophers have, at times, thought, or spoken as if they thought, that they could construct a body of first principles which should be to knowledge in general what a science is to some particular application,--the general theory of physics, for example, to astronomy. Philosophy would then be a system of such ultimate principles. The day for such systems has, I think, passed. We have learnt that it is for ever impossible to spin real knowledge out of pure logic. What the universe, or the little bit of it that we know, actually is, can only be learnt by experience; and if experience presupposes categories or forms of intuition, still, without experience, they remain empty; as incapable of producing truth as a mill of grinding flour without corn. Philosophers must admit that on such terms we get only "brain cobwebs"; ingenious feats of intellectual legerdemain, where the operator shows his skill by dexterously hiding away his assumptions, and bringing them out at the end as triumphantly demonstrated conclusions. The more modest ideal, which is now presented to us, is what is called the unification of knowledge. That means, no doubt, that we have to bring our theories into harmony and consistency; to get rid of the hypothetical and conjectural elements which have intruded themselves from earlier and cruder speculation; and so to analyse the primary factors of thought and the most general conceptions, that we may not have to assume in one relation what we dispute in another. Even this process is, no doubt, exceedingly difficult; it is difficult partly because the human mind has, generally speaking, to begin at the wrong