In ordinary life we attach but little importance to this machinery of cognition. We incline to let the fact of synthesis drop out of sight, as if it required no further study or notice, and we regard the things connected as exclusively worth attending to. The interest centres on the object--on the matter: the formal element--the connective tissue--is _only_ an instrument of no importance, except in view of the end it helps us to. We use general and half-explained terms, such as development, evolution, continuity, as bridges from one thing to another, without giving any regard to the means of locomotion on their own account. Some one thing is the product of something else: we let the term 'product' slip out of the proposition as unimportant: and then read the statement so as to explain the one thing by turning it into the other. Things, according to this opinion, are all-important: the rest is mere words. These relations between things are not open to further investigation or definition: they are each _sui generis,_ or peculiar: and even if the logician in his analysis of inference finds it advisable to deal with them, he will be content, if he can classify them in some approximate way, as a basis for his subdivision of propositions. This is certainly one way of getting rid of Metaphysics--for the time.
But there are epochs in life, and epochs in universal history, when the mind withdraws from its immersion in active life, and reflects upon its own behaviour as on the proceedings of some strange creature, of which it is a mere spectator. At such seasons when we stop to reflect upon the partial scene, and close our eyes to the totality, doubts begin to arise, whether our procedure is justified when we unify and combine the isolated phenomena. Have we any right to throw our own subjectivity, the laws of our imagination and thought, into the natural world? Would it not be more proper to refrain altogether from the use of such conceptions?
Philosophy, said one of the ancients[2], begins in wonder, and ends in wonder. It begins from the surprise that something could _be_ what it purports to be: it ends in the marvel of our having _thought_ anything else possible. Such a phrase well becomes the naive age in which the soul goes freely forth, wandering from one novelty to another, curious to find out all that can be known,--like the young wanderer on the sea-shore whom fresh pebbles and new shells tempt endlessly to fill his basket. But as the ages roll on, and the accumulations of the past grow heavier in the receptacle, the need of a re-examination of the stores becomes imperative. The bright colours have faded--and generally they fade soon: there has been much picked up in the inexperience of youthful enthusiasm which maturer reflection hardly can think worth carrying further.