Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/434

dealing with nature, and with the universal categories of finite experience, which was most characteristic of the forms of Idealism prevalent in Germany in the early part of this century. Our historical indebtedness to those forms of Idealism for our Fourth Conception of Being has been obvious all along, and needs here have no explicit confession. On the other hand, the application of this conception to the theory of nature, both by Schelling and by Hegel, seems to me to have been as far astray as a larger minded modern philosophical doctrine can be. It is not so much that this earlier idealistic philosophy of nature was founded upon a priori methods, and disregarded the special sciences; for as a fact the Naturphilosophie both of the Schellingian and of the Hegelian schools derived many, perhaps most of its special principles, from the text-books of science then current; and its use of experience, if capricious and fragmentary, was in general intended to be serious. But the essential principles of the application of idealistic conceptions of the unity of Being to the interpretation of nature were, in those systems, false, because a disposition to arrange the sciences in an arbitrarily defined hierarchy, to divide nature into sharply contrasted regions, celestial and terrestrial, inorganic and organic, extra-human and human, predetermined all the speculative interpretations attempted. We now know that the special sciences form no mere hierarchy; that organic and inorganic nature, however divided they may be, are also very profoundly linked. We know that the ancient contrasts between terrestial and celestial physical processes and substances appear, the farther we go in the study of nature, the less significant. We know