More significant still is the scientific revolution, working out especially in the domain of physics. The day of simple empiricism is past, and with the doctrine of “Correlation of forces” there has arisen a stage of reflection that deepens rapidly into the purely speculative. For the further elucidation of this important point the two following articles have been prepared. It is hoped that the first one will answer more definitely the question now arising in the mind of the reader, “What is this Speculative Knowing of which you speak?” and that the second one will show whither Natural Science is fast hastening. With regard to the pretensions of this Journal, its editors know well how much its literary conduct will deserve censure and need apology. They hope that the substance will make up in some degree for deficiencies in form; and, moreover, they expect to improve in this respect through experience and the kind criticisms of friends. THE SPECULATIVE. “We need what Genius is unconsciously seeking, and, by some daring generalization of the universe, shall assuredly discover, a spiritual calculus, a _Novum Organon_, whereby nature shall be divined in the soul, the soul in God, matter in spirit, polarity resolved into unity; and that power which pulsates in all life, animates and builds all organizations, shall manifest itself as one universal deific energy, present alike at the outskirts and centre of the universe, whose centre and circumference are one; omniscient, omnipotent, self-subsisting, uncontained, yet containing all things in the unbroken synthesis of its being.”—(“CALCULUS,” _one of Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings.”_) At the end of the sixth book of Plato’s Republic, after a characterization of the two grades of sensuous knowing and the grade of the understanding, “which is obliged to set out from hypotheses, for the reason that it does not deal with principles but only with results,” we find the speculative grade of knowing characterized as “that in which the soul, setting out from an hypothesis, proceeds to an unhypothetical principle, and makes its way without the aid of [sensuous] images, but solely through ideas themselves.” The mathematical procedure which begins by hypothecating definitions, axioms, postulates, and the like, which it never examines nor attempts to deduce or prove, is the example given by Plato of the method of the Understanding, while he makes the speculative Reason “to posit hypotheses by the Dialectic, _not as fixed principles_, but only as starting points, in order that, by removing them, it may arrive at the unhypothetical—the principle of the universe.” This most admirable description is fully endorsed by Aristotle, and firmly established in a two-fold manner: