and grant that we the wisdomBut if Aristotle had not his masters enthusiasm for practical reforms, nor his masters command of all the forces by which humanity is raised to a higher life, he had, more even than his master, the Greek passion for knowledge as such, apart from its utilitarian applications, and embracing in its vast orb the lowliest things with the loftiest, the most fragmentary glimpses and the largest revelations of truth. He demanded nothing but the materials for generalisation, and there was nothing from which he could not generalise. There was a place for everything within the limits of his world-wide system. Never in any human soul did the309 theorising passion burn with so clear and bright and pure a flame. Under its inspiration his style more than once breaks into a strain of sublime, though simple and rugged eloquence. Speaking of that eternal thought which, according to him, constitutes the divine essence, he exclaims:This, then, was the revolution effected by Aristotle, that he found Greek thought in the form of a solid, and unrolled into a surface of the utmost possible tenuity, transparency, and extension. In so doing, he completed what Socrates and Plato had begun, he paralleled the course already described by Greek poetry, and he offered the first example of what since then has more than once recurred in the history of philosophy. It was thus that the residual substance of Locke and Berkeley was resolved into phenomenal succession by Hume. It was thus that the unexplained reality of Kant and Fichte was drawn out into a play of logical relations by Hegel. And, if we may venture on a forecast of the future towards which speculation is now advancing, it is thus that the limits imposed on human knowledge by positivists and agnostics in our own day, are yielding to the criticism of those who wish to establish either a perfect identity or a perfect equation between consciousness and being. This is the position represented in France by M. Taine, a thinker offering many points of resemblance to Aristotle, which it would be interesting to work out had we space at our command for the purpose. The forces which are now guiding English philosophy in an analogous direction have hitherto escaped observation on account of their disunion among themselves, and their intermixture with others of a different character. But on the whole we may say that the philosophy of Mill and his school corresponds very nearly in its practical idealism to Platos teaching; that Mr. Herbert Spencer approaches326 Aristotle on the side of theorising systematisation, while sharing to a more limited extent the metaphysical and political realism which accompanied it: that Lewes was carrying the same transformation a step further in his unfinished Problems of Life and Mind; that the philosophy of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson is marked by the same spirit of actuality, though not without a vista of multitudinous possibilities in the background; that the Neo-Hegelian school are trying to do over again for us what their master did in Germany; and that the lamented Professor Clifford had already given promise of one more great attempt to widen the area of our possible experience into co-extension with the whole domain of Nature.209