But with the outward differentiation an inward went hand in hand. In some cases the intellectual or scientific, in others the emotional, in others the active faculties became predominant. Human nature in order to attain all its completeness had first of all, as it were, to lose its life in order to gain it. The individual had to sacrifice part of his all-sided development in order that he might gain it again, and in a larger measure, through the medium of society. This process is the process of civilisation: the long and, as it often seems, weary road by which man can only realise himself by self-sacrifice: can only reach unity through the way of diversity, and must die to live. It is a process in which it is but too easy to notice only one stage and speak of it as if it were the whole. It is possible sometimes to identify civilisation with the material increase in the means of producing enjoyment, or with the progress of scientific teaching as to the laws of those material phenomena on which material civilisation is largely dependent. It is possible sometimes to take as its test the stores of artistic works, and the extension of a lively and delicate love of all that is beautiful and tasteful. One may identify it with a high-toned moral life, and with an orderly social system. Or one may maintain that the real civilisation of a country presupposes a lofty conception and reverent attitude to the supreme source of all that is good, and true, and beautiful.
The question is important as bearing on the relation of philosophy to the special sciences. Philosophy is sometimes identified with the sum of sciences: sometimes with their complete unification. Philosophy, says a modern, is knowledge completely unified. It is of course to some extent a question of words in what sense a term is to be defined. And no one will dispute that the scientific element is in point of form the most conspicuous aspect of philosophy. Yet if we look at the historical use of the term, one or two considerations suggest themselves. Philosophy, said an ancient, is the knowledge of things human and divine. Again and again, it has claimed for its task to be a guide and chart of human life--to reveal the form of good and of beauty. But to do this, it must be more than a mere science, or than a mere system of the sciences. Again, it has been urged by modern critics that Kant at last discovered for philosophy her true province--the study of the conditions and principles of human knowledge. But though epistemology is all-important, the science of knowledge is not identical with philosophy: nor did Kant himself think it was. Rather his view is on the whole in accord with what he has called the 'world's (as opposed to the scholar's) conception of philosophy[1],' as the science of the bearing of all ascertainable truths on the essential aims of human reason--_teleologia humanae rationis_,--in accord, too, with the world's conception of the philosopher as no mere logician, but the legislator of human reason.