then, with its other voice, proceeded to recognize him as a member of the intelligible world, a “spectator of all time and existence,” and gifted with the absolute freedom of a will which could be determined by nothing but itself. “The solitary,” says Aristotle, “must be either a god or a beast,” and the eighteenth century, in its conception of the individual, seemed to oscillate between the one and the other till Kant, awaking to the impossibility of omitting either aspect of his being, demanded that he should be conceived as both at once. Kant thus set the problem of the future; and if he did not solve it, he at least showed the futility of any narrow or one-sided solution and the direction in which an adequate solution could alone be sought. In short, Kant asked the question to which the nineteenth century, in all its philosophical reflection, has been striving to find an answer. For in philosophy, as in other departments of knowledge, the work of the nineteenth century has been one of mediation and reconciliation. It has been an endeavor to break down the sharp antithesis of philosophical and scientific theories that was characteristic of an earlier time. In the writings of the greatest thinkers, the oppositions of materialism and spiritualism, of sensationalism and idealism, of empiricism and _a priori_ speculation, of individualism and socialism, all the great oppositions of theoretical and practical philosophy, which formerly were held to be absolute and irreconcilable, have been modified, restated, reduced to the _relative_ antagonism of the different aspects of one truth. The great controversies of the past have thus passed into a new phase, in which absolute statements _pro_ and _con_ have become, as it were, antiquated; and the question is no longer whether a particular doctrine or its opposite is true, but what are the elements of truth and error in each of them, and how we can attain to a comprehensive view of things, in which justice is done to both. And if it be asked, what are the principles or ideas that have suggested this reconciling work, and have been the guides of the greatest scientific or philosophic writers in attempting to achieve it, I think the answer must be that they are _the idea of organic unity_, and, as implied in that, _the idea of development_. Goethe and Hegel, in Germany; Comte, in France; Darwin and Spencer, in England, are writers who almost span the whole range of difference in modern thought; but they, and a multitude of others in every department of study, have been inspired by the ideas of organism and development. And they have all used them somewhat in the same way to turn the edge of the old controversial weapons, or to lift thought above the “yes” and “no” of opposing dogmatisms. It is true that the definitions or interpretations of the ideas of organism and development given by these writers are very different, and often, indeed, so sharply opposed that