THE PHILOSOPHIC ASPECTS OF HISTORY. By Hon. Wм. T. HARRIS, LL.D., Commissioner of Education. Every science must put on a philosophic form before it becomes useful in practical life. If this sounds strange to any one let him consider that a science (and let each one conceive here his own favorite special science, say history for this present occasion) seeks first to make an exhaustive inventory of the facts within its field of investigation, and secondly to discover the laws of evolution of those facts. By the principle of evolution we come to see exactly how each fact is related to every other as antecedent or subsequent in the stage of development. Thus a science in its second stage unites facts into a system so that each fact throws light on all other facts in its province and is in turn illuminated by them. Such illumination of one detail by the rest brings out the principle of the whole system. The whole comes to be revealed in each part-not the whole as an aggregate, but the whole as a principle—the spirit that unites the details and makes them into an organism. The difference between an organic being and an inorganic mass is this, according to Kant: "In an organism each part is both means and end to all the others "—each part of the body, like the hand, for example, exists for the sake of all the other parts of the body, and so, too, all the other parts contribute in their turn to its production and sustenance. Science, therefore, ever struggles towards a knowledge of the principle that animates the whole province, thus tending towards that kind of knowledge which we may term philosophical. In its third stage science becomes philosophical in very truth, for it seeks to discover the relation of each special science to every other. Each science, then, becomes an individual detail employed to throw light on every other science, and, in turn, to receive illumination by the concentrated light of all these others. Philosophy differs from science only by this comprehensiveness; it seeks to show the validity of a first principle of all things, whereas science in its second stage seeks only the principle of its subordinate province and not the supreme principle of the world as a whole. But science in its third stage-comparative science-science that combines one science with another-is not different from philosophy; it is philosophy. Now the actually working scientific man has to resist the tendency to philosophize. If he wishes to serve the cause of all science he must single out some new province of investigation and proceed to inventory its facts and individual items. He must continually resort to the first stage of scientific work-the stage of mere inventory and verification-Antæus touching the earth, as it were. But confine himself as he may to the mere inventory of his chosen province, he proceeds insensibly into the second stage of scientific thought, and cannot help seeing more and more in each of his facts the light which the other facts throw upon it. Upon completing an exhaustive inventory of the facts in his province each part becomes luminous because it is seen to be organically related to the rest. Goethe symbolizes this result of inductive science by the figure of Homunculus in the second part of his Faust. Limited to a small province symbolized by the bottle, the entire province may be exhaustively inventoried and then the facts be organically related so that each is alike means and end for all the rest-a sort of a living organism, as it were-and this living organism is symbolized by Homunculus, who, as Goethe tells us, is continually longing to burst his bottle— that is, he wishes to transcend his narrow province of knowledge and attain to philosophic knowledge that sees one principle in everything. Now, as said at the beginning, the philosophical view is always the practical one, for it alone sees the bearing of all |