those who have doubted the possibility of true knowledge. Among the objections which the sceptics of ancient times brought against philosophy, the conflict of systems was one of the first and most important. It is evident, that, from this point of view, the history of philosophy, in the strict sense of the term, is impossible. Either the many so-called systems are accepted as mere historical facts, and the history of philosophy is resolved into a history of philosophers, of their lives, opinions, and schools, which the historian sets forth as well as the sources of information concerning permit, and as he understands those sources, or these systems are regarded merely as having failed to reach the unity of true knowledge, and criticised without reference to their historical character. In such a consideration of the history of philosophy, history is entirely separated from philosophy. In the first case, the history of philosophy is a subject merely of a narration: in the second, it is a subject merely of critical examination. The narration of the first is as uncritical as the criticism of the second is unhistorical. From the one-sided historical point of view, there is indeed a history, but no philosophy: from the onesided critical point of view, there is indeed a philosophy, but no history. This philosophy, without historical interest and without historical insight, either regards the problem of true knowledge as insoluble, and the given systems as nothing but errors, or it maintains, on practical grounds, a certain knowledge of the truth, valid in all cases, but which those systems only imperfectly attain, and mingle with false opinions. Thus, it deals with historical systems either absolutely sceptically, rejecting them all, or eclectically, separating and culling out the true according to a completely subjective principle. Now, these critics are not what they aim to be, by far. They suppose that they judge these systems with entire freedom from prejudice, and in absolute independence, as though they stood above the history of philosophy. They do not know that they have received their stand-points from this very history; that these standpoints are historical events with historical conditions; that they are necessary products of an entirely definite historical position of philosophy, and that this very fact gives them their authority for the time. These two points of view the historical and critical-are naturally the first from which the history of philosophy is considered. It is written at first either by historians or by sceptics and eclectic philosophers. Three important sources of the knowledge of ancient philosophy are so many examples of these historical, sceptical, and eclectic stand-points, Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, Johannes Stobäus. And among the first writers who, in modern times, have expounded and criticised the systems of philosophy, there are three with corresponding points of view, Thomas Stanley, Pierre Bayle, and Jacob Brucker. - But this separation of the historical and critical points. of view does not solve the problem of the history of philosophy, but merely evades the difficulty. From the one, we have history without philosophy; from the other, philosophy without history. It is impossible to comprehend how the history of philosophy is possible from either of these standpoints. And so the question returns, How is the history of philosophy as science possible? Let us inquire somewhat more rigorously whether philosophy, as love of wisdom, as striving for truth, is really incapable of a history. Let us admit for the present the usual explanation, according to which truth consists in adequate conceptions; i.e., in perfect agreement between our concept and its object. If we assume that the object is a given, in itself completed, thing, which remains unchangeably like itself, certainly only two cases are possible: our concept either does, or does not, correspond to this so constituted object. And if we assume that there is just as certainly a completed concept, only two cases are possible: either we have, or do not have, this true concept; either we are in com plete possession of the truth, or we are completely deprived of it. In either case, every kind of history is excluded from the territory of truth. But this is never the case. However definite and unchangeable may be the object of our knowledge, the concept corresponding to it is never so perfect that with one grasp, as it were, we lay hold of the object, or miss it altogether. Even if true concepts were innate, we should have to become gradually conscious of them: we should pass from the twilight to the noonday of knowledge, in a succession of experiences which would be equivalent to a history of our consciousness. And, if true conceptions are not innate, they must be produced by the mind, i.e., be formed, and, therefore, pass through a process of development which can be nothing else than a gradual correction of our concepts, which, in their first state, are not conformable to objects. Every true concept in the human consciousness has become so: there every truth has a history upon which its existence depends, and this history forms an essential part of the progress in the culture and development of the individual. The greater the difficulties to be overcome, the more numerous the problems to be solved in order to bring the truth into the light, the longer, of course, continues its development. Whole periods remain involved in errors, and it requires the strength of a new age to detect and correct and overcome them. Centuries work on such a process of development. Such a truth has a history on a large scale. Every science is an historical growth, and could only become what it is by a gradual development. The fabric of the world, in its constitution, its laws, its mechanical order, remains unchangeably the same as an object of human contemplation; but astronomy had to develop and fix a series of conceptions, then dissolve and abandon them, before it could reach true knowledge after so many centuries. However erroneous the old system, it formed the necessary vestibule to the new and correct one. The second of the above suppositions is, therefore, never i true. True concepts are never once for all stamped upon the mind, and perfect. On the contrary, they are always problems to be solved. But even the first of them is not always true. The object of our knowledge does not always remain unchangeably the same. What if this object itself forms a process, is undergoing a change which is constantly renewed, not in such a change as is continually repeated according to the same laws, like motion in nature, and the circulation of life, but in a creative activity, in a really progressive development? What if this object not merely has, but unfolds and represents its entire nature in, a history, without being exhausted in any period of it whatever? If, in brief, this object is of a living, spiritual nature? It is evident that the knowledge of such an object not merely requires development, in common with all human knowledge, but, in order to correspond to its object, must itself be in a state of historical progress. A process of progressing development can only be conceived by a process of progressing knowledge. This process of progressing development is the human mind: this progressing process of knowledge is philosophy as the self-knowledge of the human mind. Since it is clear that the human mind, as self-conscious, must be an object to itself, it must be a problem to itself. It must seek to solve this problem: it cannot exist without this effort. This effort is philosophy. Without it the mind could not be a problem to itself, could not be its own object, could not, therefore, be self-conscious. Human self-consciousness is a problem which philosophy solves. The human mind is like an historical development which ramifies into a variety of modes and into a series of systems of culture which the mind produces from itself, consummates, and outgrows, and out of which, as its material, produces new forms of civilization. What can the knowledge, which seeks to correspond to this object, be, except a variety and series of systems of knowledge, which, like their object, lead an historical life? What, therefore, can philosophy be in this relation, except the history of philosophy? It is like a quantity whose value is made up of a series of quantities. At the first glance, it seemed as if the concept of philosophy excluded from itself the possibility of a history, as something incompatible with it: we now see, that, on the contrary, philosophy not merely admits historical development as a possibility, but demands it as a necessity; that to every philosophical system with its historical worth, belongs also its historical truth; that each of these systems demands as rigidly to be understood in its historical. characteristics as in its truth; that, therefore, the history of philosophy as science unites in the closest manner the historical point of view with the critical, the historical interest with the philosophical. If its object were the philosopher's stone, its truth would be something found, a prize, which is either won or lost. If its object is the human mind, its truth itself is a living history, and it must develop and advance within the great march of the civilization of humanity. This must be true if indeed the human mind is the real object of philosophy; if in its fundamental characteristics, in its distinctive problems, philosophy is nothing else than the self-knowledge of the mind, the self-knowledge of humanity universally. But is this true? Is not this explanation too narrow and limited? Does not the problem of philosophy embrace more than the human mind? We call it self-knowledge it calls itself knowledge of the universe (weltweisheit). And the only relation which the knowledge of self can sustain to the knowledge of the universe, is that of the human mind to the universe; i.e., that of a part to the whole. Have we not, therefore, drawn a fallacious inference, and extended to philosophy in general what is true of it only in a limited sense, asserted of it universally what is only true partially? It is certainly true that all historical systems have by no means put the problem of human self-knowledge in the front, and made all others depend upon it. Rather only in rare |