bring his views and mine into harmony. In much the same sense I desire to make use of the views of my other two critics. And still further, I wish to use this opportunity to give the whole conception of the Absolute which I am permitted to defend a more careful statement, a more minute examination, a fuller defence, and a more extended development than I have heretofore had the opportunity to do.
I regret only that the situation in which the present opportunity puts me is thus so necessarily that of restating and defending what appears as my own thesis; as if it were in any sense my own property, or a cause in the least dependent upon me for just this present defence. “What can I clearly see?” — this is the ceaseless question of the student of philosophy. In this sense, and in this only, he seeks, as such a student, for self-consciousness. But otherwise, ideally speaking, he ought as a philosopher to have no personal property in ideas, no private cause to defend, no pet thesis to maintain, no argument for whose fate he fears, no selfish concern whether he refutes or is refuted, no author’s fondness for his past productions, no advocate’s pride in maintaining his old notions. Naked of all private treasures, he ought to seek, each time anew, the priceless pearl of truth. This, in fact, is the model that Plato’s dialogues set before the thinker. However often one might win this pearl of truth, one’s frailty, and one’s fleeting moments, would ever again turn the possession of it into a mere memory of former insight; and so one must ever seek afresh. This is the thinker’s ideal. If fortune makes him a poor professor, telling over and over again his
