crowned with success, have proved that even these sciences spring at their source from something which is conventional and therefore subjective, and that they arrive, by a chain of hypothetical syllogisms, at conclusions of convenient practical application, answering to our experience, which is always susceptible of control and modification. And so it has come to pass that, along with these sciences, metaphysic also is denied an absolute value in the quest of objective truth; and the edifice of logic, which estabhshed general and absolute principles wherefrom certain and assured conclusions were drawn by way of deduction according to given rules, has crumbled to the ground. The demonstrative power of the syllogism once placed in doubt, it was soon banished from the field of the positive sciences; and man, abandoning every attempt at a rational reconstruction of the cosmos, sought to find in himself, in the demands
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