It seems to me that we are already at this stage, or are at the point of getting to it. Without arguing this question, however, (which, indeed, can be proved only by acting upon it, only _ambulando_,) I would point out that the constant detailed work of science upon the world in theory and in invention, must in time give that world an evident meaning in human consciousness. What prevents scientific men from now realising this fact, is that they are still afraid of certain “transcendent” entities and forces; afraid that if they relax their hostility to metaphysic, some one will spring upon them the old scholastic scheme of external, supernatural unrealities. To those who take the prevailing agnosticism not as a thing, but as a symptom, this agnosticism means just this: The whole set of external, or non-immanent entities, is now on the point of falling away, of dissolving. We got just so far, popularly, as holding that they are unknowable. In other words, they are crowded to the extreme verge. One push more, and off they go. The popular consciousness will hold not only that they are unknowable, but that they are not. What then? Science freed from its fear of an external and dogmatic metaphysic, will lose its fear of metaphysic. Having unquestioned and free possession of its own domain, that of knowledge and of fact, it will also be free to build up the intrinsic metaphysic of this domain. It will be free to ask after the structure of meanings which makes up the skeleton of this world of knowledge. The moment this point is reached, the speculative critical logic worked out in the development of Kantian ideas, and the positive, specific work of the scientific spirit will be at one. It will be seen that this logic is no revived, redecked scholasticism, but a complete abandonment of scholasticism; that it deals simply with the inner anatomy of the realm of scientific reality, and has simply endeavored, with however much of anticipation, to dissect and lay bare, at large and in general, the features of the same subject-matter, which the positive sciences have been occupying themselves with in particular and in detail. That we are almost at the point of such conflux, a point where the general, and therefore somewhat abstract lines of critical logic will run in to the particular, and therefore somewhat isolated, lines of positive science, is, in my opinion, the present position of logical theory. JOHN DEWEY. FOOTNOTES: [1] Jevons, _Elementary Lessons in Logic_, p. 5. [2] Stock, _Deductive Logic_, p. 3.