Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/20

6 D. G. BITCHIE : and Aristotle is scholarship. Much of the minute study of Kant has been correctly called " Kantphilologie ". The humanist tradition in education, which has thrown a charm round the art and the literature and the life of periods that seem unprofitable subjects of study to those immersed in practical business or in the sciences that are directly con- nected with the things of industry and commerce this humanist tradition is undoubtedly a chief support of the study of the old philosophers. Apart, however, from any side interest in such a study, there are sufficiently strong reasons for it in the nature of philosophy itself. Bacon and Descartes, Locke and Kant, each in his turn, thought that he had shaken off the fetters of the past. Yet each in different degrees and ways shows that the ideas of the past do not bind us by mere external fetters, but have grown into the very structure of our minds. Bacon urges the study of facts without the assumption of philosophical theories ; but his whole thinking about nature is pervaded by the assumption of the atomist doctrine, which, though unacknowledged, lies at the basis of his, as of most popular philosophy. Descartes, a far greater and more ori- ginal philosophical thinker, succeeds in clearing his mind more completely of traditional concepts ; and yet even he cannot escape from the system against which he rebels, and he fails to escape just because he turns away from the study and criticism of older theories. No sooner has he reached his solid basis, the one indubitable fact of self-consciousness, on which to rebuild the fabric of philosophy, than the scholas- tic notion of substance slips unrecognised into his thinking ; and the self, the ego, becomes " a substance that thinks " set over against the substance that is extended. The dualism of popular philosophy, inherited from scholasticism and in- directly from Platonism, is exaggerated and stiffened in the philosophy which professed to start clear of all assumptions. Locke, who in his turn seeks to make an absolutely fresh start and to interrogate consciousness for himself, retains this same notion of substance, though he is clearly puzzled by its strange emptiness of meaning. What is still more significant, Locke like Bacon assumes the passivity of mind. It is a mirror or a blank sheet of paper on which things produce more or less perfect copies of themselves. Plato and Aristotle had used this picture of the writing tablet, but had used it in a more careful and conscious way, and a study of their psychology might have made Locke more cautious in his dealings with the metaphors of mental " images " and "impressions". Even Kant, who to escape the difficulties