Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/22

8 D. G. RITCHIE : wrong in his opinion, he argues that the saying of Simonides must be otherwise interpreted or that the saying was wrongly ascribed to Simonides. 1 The same habit exists among our- selves, practised in all seriousness and not only with reference to the Bible. The discussion between sensationalist and intellectualist has sometimes taken the form of different interpretations of Locke, especially where Locke's Essay has become the traditional student's book. Idealist and realist, intuitionalist and positivist have each been anxious to invoke the name of Kant ; and opposing parties have sheltered themselves under the broad shadow of Hegel, distinguished as Bight and Left and Centre, like the groups in a French Chamber of Deputies. Even those who protest against a dominant authoritative system often do so in the guise of a return to some favoured doctrine of the past. "Back to Kant" is one form of the revolt against the post-Kantian idealists. The second attitude is that to which I have already re- ferred as represented by Bacon and Descartes revolt against authority, assertion of individual independence in thinking. Earlier philosophies are regarded as false. They are systems to be thrown aside. If they are dealt with, it is only that they may be refuted. But if they are dealt with at all, dis- tinctions have soon to be made. They are not all false in the same degree. Bacon, e.g., has a kindlier feeling for the older Greek philosophers, "quorum scripta perierunt" 2 than for Plato and Aristotle, whose works have floated down on the stream of time to encumber the intellectual powers of mankind. If some of the ideas of older philosophers are less to be condemned, they receive a certain relative approval. And so this attitude of protest and revolt can only maintain itself as a purely negative attitude towards the past by ignoring the study of it altogether. When such study asserts itself, as it is sure to do wherever humanist studies are not alto- gether supplanted by the mathematical and natural sciences, the negative attitude must give way to a recognition that the philosophical thinking of the past was a preparation for the better philosophy of the present. A Comtist history of philosophy is indeed only a history of successive and con- flicting forms of error ; but these systems which are refuted one after the other are regarded as preparing the way for the clear-sighted, disillusioned positivism which has learnt to escape the metaphysical, as well as the theological, stage of thought. As we have seen, however, the metaphysical stage 1 Cf. Republic, i., 331-335. 2 Cf. Novum Organum, Praefatio.