ONE:Both slowly struggled back into consciousness in the fitful dreams of mediaeval sleep. Nature was represented by astrology with its fatalistic predetermination of events; idealism by the alchemical lore which was to give its possessor eternal youth and inexhaustible wealth. With the complete revival of classic literature and the temporary neutralisation of theology by internal discord, both sprang up again in glorious life, and produced the great art of the sixteenth century, the great science and philosophy of the seventeenth. Later on, becoming self-conscious, they divide, and their partisans draw off into two opposing armies, Rousseau against Voltaire, Herder against Kant, Goethe against Schiller, Hume against himself. Together they bring about the Revolution; but after marching hand in hand to the destruction of all existing institutions they again part company, and, putting on the frippery of a dead faith, confront one another, each with its own ritual, its own acolytes, its own intolerance, with feasts of Nature and goddesses of Reason, in mutual and murderous hostility. When the storm subsided, new lines of demarcation were laid down, and the cause of political liberty was dissociated from what seemed to be thoroughly discredited figments. Nevertheless, imaginative literature still preserves traces of the old conflict, and on examining the four greatest English novelists of the last fifty years we shall find that Dickens and Charlotte Bront, though personally most unlike, agree in representing the arbitrary, subjective, ideal side of life, the subjugation of things to self, not of self to things; he transfiguring them in the light of humour, fancy, sentiment; she transforming them by the alchemy of inward passion; while102 Thackeray and George Eliot represent the triumph of natural forces over rebellious individualities; the one writer depicting an often crude reality at odds with convention and conceit; while the other, possessing, if not an intrinsically greater genius, at least a higher philosophical culture, discloses to us the primordial necessities of existence, the pitiless conformations of circumstance, before which egoism, ignorance, illusion, and indecision must bow, or be crushed to pieces if they resist.
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THREE:
THREE:In studying the growth of philosophy as an historical evolution, repetitions and anticipations must necessarily be of frequent occurrence. Ideas meet us at every step which can only be appreciated when we trace out their later developments, or only understood when we refer them back to earlier and half-forgotten modes of thought. The speculative tissue is woven out of filaments so delicate and so complicated that it is almost impossible to say where one begins and the other ends. Even conceptions which seem to have been transmitted without alteration are constantly acquiring a new value according to the connexions into which they enter or the circumstances to which they are applied. But if the method of evolution, with its two great principles of continuity and relativity, substitutes a maze of intricate lines, often returning on themselves, for the straight path along which progress was once supposed to move, we are more than compensated by the new sense of coherence and rationality where illusion and extravagance once seemed to reign supreme. It teaches us that the dreams of a great intellect may be better worth our attention than the waking perceptions of ordinary men. Combining fragments of the old order with rudimentary outlines of the new, they lay open the secret laboratory of spiritual chemistry, and help to bridge over the interval separating the most widely contrasted phases of life and thought. Moreover, when we have once accustomed ourselves to break up past systems of philosophy172 into their component elements, when we see how heterogeneous and ill-cemented were the parts of this and that proud edifice once offered as the only possible shelter against dangers threatening the very existence of civilisationwe shall be prepared for the application of a similar method to contemporary systems of equally ambitious pretensions; distinguishing that which is vital, fruitful, original, and progressive in their ideal synthesis from that which is of merely provisional and temporary value, when it is not the literary resuscitation of a dead past, visionary, retrograde, and mischievously wrong. And we shall also be reminded that the most precious ideas have only been shaped, preserved, and transmitted through association with earthy and perishable ingredients. The function of true criticism is, like Robert Brownings Roman jeweller, to turn on them the proper fiery acid of purifying analysis which dissolves away the inferior metal and leaves behind the gold ring whereby thought and action are inseparably and fruitfully united.
THREE:In Platos Parmenides we have to note the germ of a new dialectic. There it is suggested that we may overcome the difficulties attending a particular theoryin this instance the theory of self-existing ideasby considering how much greater are the difficulties which would ensue on its rejection. The arguments advanced by Zeno the Eleatic against the reality of motion are mentioned as a case in point; and Plato proceeds to illustrate his proposed method by showing what consequences respectively follow if we first assume the existence, and then the non-existence of the One; but the whole analysis seems valueless for its immediate purpose, since the resulting impossibilities on either side are left exactly balanced; and Plato does not, like some modern metaphysicians, call in our affections to decide the controversy.
