Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/24

10 D. G. RITCHIE : formulated ideas, the development of philosophical systems often gives the clearest indication of the relation in which successive stages of society stand to one another. In other words, the history of philosophy may often serve as a clue to guide us in the attempt to reach a philosophy of history. Plato and Aristotle help us to understand the Hellenic world, Thomas Aquinas to understand the middle ages and their relation to the ancient world, Descartes to understand the period of the Reformation, and so on. It may be most convenient to discuss this third attitude towards the philosophers of the past an attitude which I think is coming to be more and more adopted at the present day in connection with the views of Hegel, who gave to it its most prominent expression and who may seem to many to have exaggerated it into falsehood. Every philosophy, Hegel admits, has been refuted. The very fact that a philo- sophy was the philosophy of some past age proves that it cannot be the truest system for a succeeding age. But it is also true that no philosophy has ever been refuted. " Every philosophy has been and still is necessary." There is but one philosophy manifesting itself in the succession of philo- sophical systems. The history of philosophy is thus an inte- gral part of philosophy itself. It is philosophy taking its time. 1 What is usually quoted from Hegel is his saying that the sequence of philosophical systems is the same as that of the sequence of the categories in his Logic ; and this is com- monly supposed to be a dictum which refutes itself by its absurdity and preposterous conceit. And the dictum is con- temptuously put aside even by historians of philosophy who have learnt Hegel's lesson very fully. Let us see first what Hegel really said and what he meant. Now what he says in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy 2 is that " on the whole (im Ganzen) the sequence of the philosophical systems is similar to the sequence of the categories ". And again in one of the Zusatze to the Encyklopcedie, 86, he says : " the relation of the earlier to the later systems is in general (im Allgemeinen) much like the relation of the earlier to the later stages of the logical Idea, and is of this kind that the later contain the earlier sublated (aufgehoben, taken up, annulled and absorbed) in them ". Hegel does not assert this as if he had got hold of a magical formula which saved him the trouble of studying history. He gives the 1 Cf. Encyklopasdie, 86, Zusatz, 2 ; Gesch. der Phil., Einleitung, A.,. 3. (Werke, vi., pp. 166-168 ; xiii., p. 42 seq.) 2 Werke, xiii., p. 43, ed. 1840. This particular sentence was not given in the edition of 1833.