glowing in every page, that metaphysics, as Danton said of the Revolution,
was devouring its own children, and led to self-annihilation; its
proclamation of Comte as the legitimate issue of all previous philosophy
and positive philosophy as its ultimate _irenicon_--all this, one might
think, would have condemned such a book from its birth. The orthodoxies
frowned; the professors sneered; the owls of metaphysic hooted from the
gloom of their various jungles; but the public read, the younger students
adopted it, the world learned from it the positive method; it held its
ground because it made clear what no one else had made clear--what
philosophy meant, and why philosophers differed so violently."

This extravagant praise becomes even absurd when the writer gravely says
that this book "had simply killed metaphysic." A popular style and method
gave the book success, along with the fact that the temper of the time made
such a statement acceptable. It cleverly indicated the weak places in the
metaphysical methods, and it presented the advantages of the inductive
method with great eloquence and ingenuity. Its satire, and its contempt for
the more spiritualistic systems, also helped to make it readable.

His later work, in which he develops his own positive conclusions, has the
merit of being one of the best expositions yet made of the philosophy of
evolution. In view, however, of his unqualified condemnation of the
theories of metaphysicians, his system is one of singular audacity of
speculation. Not even Schelling or Hegel has gone beyond him in theorizing,
or exceeded him in the ground traversed beyond the limits of demonstration.
He who had held up all speculative systems to scorn, distanced those he had
condemned, and showed how easy it is to take theory for fact. Metaphysic
has not had in its whole history a greater illustration of the daring of
speculation than in the case of Lewes's theory of the relations of the
subjective and objective. He interprets matter and mind, motion and