as ideas
realise themselves in space and time, they come within the scope of the
man of science. It is said that all bad German systems of philosophy
when they die come to England. Hegelianism has certainly been very
fashionable in this country, and its influence is still observable in
academic circles.

Auguste Comte is the Bacon of the nineteenth century. It has been his
object to construct a _positive_ philosophy; that is to say, a doctrine
capable of embracing all the sciences, and, with them, all the problems
of social life. He holds that every branch of knowledge passes through
three stages: the supernatural, or fictitious; the metaphysical or
abstract; the positive or scientific. When the positive method is
adopted, then shall we again have one general doctrine, powerful because
general.

The metaphysicians have failed to penetrate to the causes of things, but
the men of science are succeeding in the humbler but far more useful
work of tracing some of the laws that govern the phenomena of nature,
and foreseeing their operations. It is only where the philosophers
started matters capable of _positive_ treatment that any advance has
been made in metaphysics. For the rest, philosophy leaves us in the
nineteenth century at precisely the same point at which we were in the
fifth. Thus is the circle completed.

JOHN LOCKE

Concerning the Human Understanding

John Locke was born at Wrington, Somersetshire, England, Aug. 29,
1632. He was educated at Westminster and at Christ Church, Oxford;
but his temperament rebelled against the system of education still
in vogue and the public disputations of the schools, which he
thought "invented for wrangling and ostentation rather than to
discover truth." It was his study of Descartes that first "gave him
a relish of philosophical things." From 1683 to 1689 he found it
prudent to sojourn in Holland. In the latter year he returned to
England, bringing with him the manuscript of the "Essay Concerning
Human Understanding," which appeared in the spring of 1690. Few
works of philosophy have made their way more rapidly than the
"Essay." Twenty editions appeared before 1700. The design of the
book, Locke explains in the introduction, is to inquire "into the
origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the
grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent." Locke died on
October