The mind of the world moves, as it were, in cycles, but with each new cycle a difference supervenes, a new tone is perceptible. History, which reflects the changing aspects of reality, does and does not repeat itself. The distinctions and the unity are neither of them the same after each step as they were before it: they have both suffered a change: it is a new scene that comes above the horizon, however like the last it may seem to the casual observer. Thus when the process of differentiation is repeated anew, it is repeated in higher terms, multiplied, and with a higher power or wider range of meaning[6]. Each unification however is a perfect world, a complete whole: it is the same sum of being; but in each successive level of advance it receives a fuller expression, and a more complexly-grouped type of features[7]. Such is the rhythmic movement,--the ebb and flow of the world, always recurring with the same burden but, as we cannot but hope, with richer variety of tones, and fuller sense of itself. The sum of actuality, the Absolute, is neither increased nor diminished. The world, the ultimate reality of experience and life, was as much a rounded total to the Hebrew Patriarchs as it is to us: without advancing, it has been, we may say, in its expression deepened, developed, and organised. In one part of the sway of thought, however, there is a harder, narrower, insistance (by practical and business minds) on the sufficiency of a definite principle to satisfy all wants and to make all mysteries plain, and a disposition to ignore all other elements of life: at another, there is a fuller recognition of the differences, gaps, and contradictions, involved in the last synthesis,--which recognition it is the tendency of scientific inquiry, of reforming efforts, of innovation, to produce: and in the last period of the sway, there is a stronger and more extended grasp taken by the unity pervading these differences,--which is the work appointed to philosophy gathering up the results of science and practical amendments.