energies. To this work it brings, also, the method of experiment. It then interferes arbitrarily with the natural occurrence of facts, and brings that to pass which otherwise would not have been; and this method it uses to investigate, to illustrate what was previously known, and to confirm what was surmised. Its end, whether through observation or experiment, is to reach general truth as opposed to matter-of-fact, universals more or less embracing as opposed to particulars, the units of thought as opposed to the units of phenomena. The body of these constitutes rational knowledge.

Nature then becomes known, not as a series of impressions on the retina of sense merely, but as a system seized by the eye of reason; for the senses show man the aspect worn by the world as it is at the moment, but reason opens to him the order obtaining in the world as it must be at every moment; and the instrument by which man rises from the phenomenal plane of experience to the necessary sphere of truth is the generalizing faculty whose operation has just been described. The office of the reason in the exercise of this faculty is to find organic form in that experience which memory preserves in the mass,—to penetrate, that is, to that mould of necessity in the world which phenomena, when they arise, must put on. The species once perceived, the mind no longer cares for the individual; the law once known, the mind no longer cares for the facts; for in these universals all particular instances, past, present, and to come, are contained in their significance. All sciences are advanced in proportion as they have thus organized their appropriate matter in abstract conceptions and laws, and are backward in proportion as there remains much in their provinces not yet so coordinated and systematized; and in their hierarchy, from astronomical physics downward, each takes rank according to the nature of the universals it deals with, as these are more or less embracing.

The matter of literature—that part of total experience which it deals with—is life; and, to confine attention to imaginative literature where alone the question of idealism arises, the matter with which imaginative literature deals is the inward and spiritual order in man's breast as distinguished from the outward and physical order with which science deals. The reason as here exercised organizes man's experience in this great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Such knowledge is, without need of 

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