(He says in explanation that “ONTOLOGY teaches us the phenomena of matter.  The first of these are the heavenly bodies comprehended by Cosmogeny.  These divide into elements—­Stoechiogeny.  The earth element divides into minerals—­Mineralogy.  These unite into one collective body—­Geogeny.  The whole in singulars is the living, or Organic, which again divides into plants and animals. Biology, therefore, divides into Organogeny, Phytosophy, Zoosophy.”)

FIRST KINGDOM.—­MINERALS. Mineralogy, Geology.

     Part III.  BIOLOGY.—­Organosophy, Phytogeny, Phyto-physiology,
               Phytology, Zoogeny, Physiology, Zoology,
               Psychology.

A glance over this confused scheme shows that it is an attempt to classify knowledge, not after the order in which it has been, or may be, built up in the human consciousness; but after an assumed order of creation.  It is a pseudo-scientific cosmogony, akin to those which men have enunciated from the earliest times downwards; and only a little more respectable.  As such it will not be thought worthy of much consideration by those who, like ourselves, hold that experience is the sole origin of knowledge.  Otherwise, it might have been needful to dwell on the incongruities of the arrangements—­to ask how motion can be treated of before space? how there can be rotation without matter to rotate? how polarity can be dealt with without involving points and lines?  But it will serve our present purpose just to point out a few of the extreme absurdities resulting from the doctrine which Oken seems to hold in common with Hegel, that “to philosophise on Nature is to re-think the great thought of Creation.”  Here is a sample:—­

“Mathematics is the universal science; so also is Physio-philosophy, although it is only a part, or rather but a condition of the universe; both are one, or mutually congruent.

“Mathematics is, however, a science of mere forms without substance.  Physio-philosophy is, therefore, mathematics endowed with substance.”

From the English point of view it is sufficiently amusing to find such a dogma not only gravely stated, but stated as an unquestionable truth.  Here we see the experiences of quantitative relations which men have gathered from surrounding bodies and generalised (experiences which had been scarcely at all generalised at the beginning of the historic period)—­we find these generalised experiences, these intellectual abstractions, elevated into concrete actualities, projected back into Nature, and considered as the internal framework of things—­the skeleton by which matter is sustained.  But this new form of the old realism is by no means the most startling of the physio-philosophic principles.  We presently read that,

“The highest mathematical idea, or the fundamental principle of all mathematics is the zero = 0."....