'The whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of the specific forms or types of unity.[6] There are many species and grades of this unity. They are not merely to be enumerated and asserted in a vague way, as they here and there force themselves upon the notice of the popular mind. Philosophy sees in that unity neither an ultimate and unanalysable fact, nor a deception, but a growth (which is also a struggle), a revealing or unfolding, which issues in an organism or system, constructing itself more and more completely by a force of its own. This system formed by these types of the fundamental unity is called the 'Idea,' of which the highest law is development. Philosophy essays to do for this connective and unifying nature, i. e. for the thought in things, something like what the sciences have done or would like to do for the facts of sense and matter,--to do for the spiritual binding-element in its integrity, what is being done for the several facts which are more or less combined. It retraces the universe of thought from its germinal form, where it seems, as it were, an indecomposable point, to the fully matured system or organism, and shows not merely that one phase of pure thought passes into another, but how it does so, and yet is not lost, but subsists suspended and deprived of its narrowness in the maturer phase. [Footnote 1: Leibniz, ed. Gerhardt, iii. 507: 'Les atomes sont l'effet de la foiblesse de nostre imagination, qui aime à se reposer et à se hater à venir à une fin dans les sous-divisions et analyses: il n'en est pas ainsi dans la nature qui vient de l'infini et va à l'infini.'] [Footnote 2: Spinoza, _Ethica,_ i. 36, App. '_Quoniam ea nobis prae ceteris grata sunt quae facile imaginari possumus, ideo homines ordinem confusioni praeferunt; quasi ordo aliquid in natura praeter respectum ad nostram imaginationem esset... Videmus itaque omnes rationes quibus vulgus solet naturam explicare modos esse tantummodo imaginandi._' Cf. _Eth._ iv. praef.: Epist. xxxii.] [Footnote 3: 'This transition of thought from the Cause to the Effect proceeds not from Reason. It derives its origin altogether from Custom and Experience.' Hume, Essay V. (Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.) 'All inferences from Experience therefore are effects of Custom.' (Ibid.)] [Footnote 4: J. Grote, _Exploratio Philosophica._] [Footnote 5: Cf. vol. ii. p. 4.] [Footnote 6: _Philosophie der Religion,_ i. p. 97: 'Die ganze Philosophie ist nichts Anderes als das Studium der Bestimmungen der Einheit.' See especially _Encycl._ § 573 (Philosophy of Mind, pp. 192 seqq.).] CHAPTER VII. ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY.