Philosophy properly so called is also the unification of science, but in a new sphere, a higher medium not recognised by the sciences themselves. The reconciliation which the philosopher believes himself to accomplish between ordinary consciousness and science is identified by either side with a phase of its antagonist error. Science will term philosophy a modified form of the old religious superstition. The popular consciousness of truth, and especially religion, will see in philosophy only a repetition or an aggravation of the evils of science. The attempt at unity will not approve itself to either, until they enter upon the ground which philosophy occupies, and move in that element. And that elevation into the philosophic ether calls for a tension of thought which is the sternest labour imposed upon man: so that the continuous action of philosophising has been often styled superhuman. If anywhere, it is in pure philosophy that proof becomes impossible, unless for those who are willing to think for themselves[5]. The philosophic lesson cannot be handed on to a mere recipient: the result, when cut off from the process which produced it, vanishes like the palace in the fairy tale.
'The whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of the specific forms or types of unity.[6] There are many species and grades of this unity. They are not merely to be enumerated and asserted in a vague way, as they here and there force themselves upon the notice of the popular mind. Philosophy sees in that unity neither an ultimate and unanalysable fact, nor a deception, but a growth (which is also a struggle), a revealing or unfolding, which issues in an organism or system, constructing itself more and more completely by a force of its own. This system formed by these types of the fundamental unity is called the 'Idea,' of which the highest law is development. Philosophy essays to do for this connective and unifying nature, i. e. for the thought in things, something like what the sciences have done or would like to do for the facts of sense and matter,--to do for the spiritual binding-element in its integrity, what is being done for the several facts which are more or less combined. It retraces the universe of thought from its germinal form, where it seems, as it were, an indecomposable point, to the fully matured system or organism, and shows not merely that one phase of pure thought passes into another, but how it does so, and yet is not lost, but subsists suspended and deprived of its narrowness in the maturer phase.