To some extent philosophy returns to the position of the wider consciousness, to the general belief in harmony and symmetry. It reverts to the unity or connexion, which the natural presumptions of mankind find in the picture of the world. The _nolo philosophari_ of the intuitivist, in reaction from the supposed excesses of the sciences, simply reverted to the bare re-statement of the popular creed. If science, e. g., had shown that the perception of an external world pre-supposed for its accomplishment an unsuspected series of intermediate steps, the mere intuitivist simply denied the intermediation by appealing to Common Sense, or to the natural instincts and primary beliefs of mankind. Conviction and natural instinct were declared to counterbalance the abstractions of science. But philosophy which seeks to comprehend existence cannot take the same ground as the intuitional school, or neglect the testimony of science. If the spiritual unity of the world has been denied and lost to sight, mere assertion that we feel and own its pervading power will not do much good. It is necessary to reconcile the contrast between the wholeness of the natural vision, and the fragmentary, but in its fragments elaborated, result of science.
The sciences break up the rough generalisations or vulgar concepts of everyday use, and make their fixed distinctions yield to analysis. They thus render continuous things which were looked at as only separate. But they tend again to substitute the results of their analysis as a new and permanent distinction and principle of things. They are like revolutionists who upset and perturb an old order, and set up a new and minuter tyranny in its place. Gradually, the general culture, the average educated intelligence gathers up the fruit of scientific research into the total development of humanity: and uses the work of science to fill up the _lacunae,_ the gaps, which make popular consciousness so irregular and disconnected. A sort of popular philosophy comes to sum up and estimate what science has accomplished: and therein is as it were the spirit of the world taking into his own hand the acquisitions won by the more audacious and self-willed of his sons, and investing them in the common store. They are set aside and preserved there, at first in an abstract and technical form, but destined soon to pass into the possession of all, and form that mass of belief and instinctive or implanted knowledge whence a new generation will draw its mental supplies. Each great scientific discovery is in its turn reduced to a part of the common stock. It leaves the technical field, and spreads into the common life of men, becoming embodied in their daily beliefs,--a seed of thought, from which, by the agency of intelligent experience, new increments of science will one day spring.