As must necessarily be the case with a writer who had neither a special aptitude for nor special training in philosophical inquiries, Roscher's metaphysical postulates are, of course, chiefly tacit. They are the common-sense, commonplace metaphysics afloat in educated German circles in the time of Roscher's youth,--during the period when his growth and education gave him his outlook on life and knowledge and laid the basis of his intellectual habits; which means that these postulates belong to what Hoeffding has called the "Romantic" school of thought, and are of a Hegelian complexion. Roscher being not a professed philosophical student, it is neither easy nor safe to particularise closely as regards his fundamental metaphysical tenets; but, as near as so specific an identification of his philosophical outlook is practicable, he must be classed with the Hegelian "Right." But since the Hegelian metaphysics had in Roscher's youth an unbroken vogue in reputable German circles, especially in those ultra-reputable circles within which lay the gentlemanly life and human contact of Roscher, the postulates afforded by the Hegelian metaphysics were accepted simply as a matter of course, and were not recognised as metaphysical at all. And in this his metaphysical affiliation Roscher is fairly typical of the early historical school of economics. The Hegelian metaphysics, in so far as bears upon the matter in hand, is a metaphysics of a self-realising life process. This life process, which is the central and substantial fact of the universe, is of a spiritual nature,--"spiritual," of course, being here not contrasted with "material." The life process is essentially active, self-determining, and unfolds by inner necessity,--by necessity of its own substantially active nature. The course of culture, in this view, is an unfolding (exfoliation) of the human spirit; and the task which economic science has in hand is to determine the laws of this cultural exfoliation in its economic aspect. But the laws of the cultural development with which the social sciences, in the Hegelian view, have to do are at one with the laws of the processes of the universe at large; and, more immediately, they are at one with the laws of the life process at large. For the universe at large is itself a self-unfolding life process, substantially of a spiritual character, of which the economic life process which occupies the interest of the economist is but a phase and an aspect. Now, the course of the processes of unfolding life in organic nature has been fairly well ascertained by the students of natural history and the like; and this, in the nature of the case, must afford a clew to the laws of cultural development, in its economic as well as in any other of its aspects or bearings,--the laws of life in the universe being all substantially spiritual and substantially at one. So we arrive at a physiological conception of culture after the analogy of the ascertained