Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller

“ What though his reasoning be forged link by link, an adamantine chain of logical necessity, it will yet be hypothetical; what though he show what truth must be, if truth there be, he cannot show that truth there is. ”

“ That this principle will carry him very far the writer feels assured, as he proceeds to test and verify it by its applicability to the different stages of Evolution—to the evolution of human society, to that of the lower animals, and finally to that of the inorganic world. ”

“ So supremely honest is our author that he will not dogmatise. “It is the consciousness that he can never transcend the supreme alternative of thought, that though he has grasped the truth, truth always leaves him with an if. ”

“ Spencer’s glory if, contrary to the drift of his own utterances, we maintain that, being the first, he cannot for this very reason be the last, and express a hope that he may prove the founder of a long dynasty of evolutionist philosophers. ”

“ Notwithstanding the purely philosophical purpose of the book, and the logical method of which the writer is a master, it is distinguished by real literary charm and often rises to eloquence.
It is not easy in a few lines to indicate the hypothesis and scheme of the writer. The first book is critical, and deals with the current philosophical systems and their connection. Positivism, by affirming the impossibility of philosophy, becomes Agnosticism ”

“ He rejects alike the epistemological and psychological methods: the fact that the mind has a history is fatal to the claims of the psychological method, as it cannot take account of that history without ceasing to be psychological, and submitting to the restrictions of historical and metaphysical methods. ”

“ And this is sufficient to explain why the world cannot appear perfect from the point of view of the imperfect. What comes first in science comes last in metaphysics; it is in the higher and subsequent that the explanation of the lower and anterior is to be sought. We can never therefore fully understand what or why anything is until we know what it is to become. The end will explain the means. Our author then discusses the formulas of the Law of Evolution, giving due honour to Mr. ”