plot....  There can be no possible doubt as to the success of this method.  Men to whom philosophy has been a wearisome swaying backward and forward of meaningless phrases, found something which they could remember and understand....  For a generation this ‘entirely popular’ book saturated the minds of the younger readers.  It has done as much as any book, perhaps-more than any, to give the key to the prevalent thought of our time about the metaphysical problems....  That such a book should have had such a triumph was a singular literary fact.  The opinions frankly expressed as to theology, metaphysics, and many established orthodoxies; its conclusion, 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 feeling, objective and subjective, as simply the outer and inner, the concave and convex, sides of one and the same reality.  Mind is the same as matter, except that it is viewed from a different aspect.  In this opinion he resembles Schelling more than any other thinker, as he does in some other of his speculations.  As a monist,