I.-HISTORY, AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. The "THE well-grounded instruction by the past can be acquired only by our withdrawing occasionally from the present age, and seeking out antiquity in and for itself. It is only this abstraction from what is before us that can lead us to an intimate and conscious living with the present. experience of our age can only be attained by our repeating within the consciousness the experiments of which it is the result and the expression. More quickly shall we pass through them than the human race did; for they had to overcome substantive obstacles in the realities of nature, we, however, only in conception. And this indeed is the main feature of instructionthat it enables the learner, by a shorter road, to run through what the first discoverer could arrive at only by a longer route. And so the older time. grows, the greater need we stand in of instruction and learning." 1 It has been observed that in dealing with the history of philosophy there are two tendencies which assert themselves more or less. The one is the tendency to present details, opinions and systems, without any attempt at discovering and unfolding a connection between them, whether a successive influence or a governing idea running through the whole. Such a method recognises a variety without connection or unity. The other and opposite tendency is to represent “the essence of history as consisting entirely in the recognition of this unity," caring little about the multiplicity of details. The erudite type of mind will be drawn to the first, the speculative mind to the second, of these methods. In regard to a single system of philosophising it is clear that but little good can come out of the former method, for a philosophy to have any value at all must have something in the shape of a principle or idea, through which to co-ordinate, rate, and explain details. A philosophy really 1 Ritter, History of Ancient Philosophy, Pref., iv, v. means, even when directed only to the phenomena before it,-of its time or age,-an attempt to bring the multiplicity under a concept. This may be very varied,—either the mixture and separation of the early Ionians, or the Mind of Anaxagoras, or the God of Xenophanes, or the Being of Parmenides, but still something that performs the function of a unifying conception. The opposite method has been called the constructive,—or the construction of history,—and this is the method or tendency which has very considerably prevailed of late, especially in philosophy. The general method, or condition of the method, of construction is that of ideal evolution or deduction according to necessary order—in co-ordination and succession-of certain stages, and then of the end or destination of the subject-matter of the history. The starting-point of the whole is a concept or idea of the matter, and of its end or final perfection. You are to have, first, the idea, and the concept of the end or destination of the matter, and you will be able ideally, through the sheer force of thought, or by thinking out what is involved in the idea, to develop stage after stage 1 Ritter, vol. i. p. 18. |