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PHILOSOPHY AND THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHERS. 23 the headmaster of a school. If a university professor is apt to be dogmatic (and the German practice of Dictaten has something to answer for), a teacher of boys is bound to be so, and it was during these years of schoolmastering that Hegel elaborated his logic. We might remember too that he edited a newspaper for a year, and the journalist inevitably tends to assume the attributes of omniscience and infalli- bility. On Hegel's own principles his " finality " is only provisional ; he sums up the thought of his time as he under- stands it. Is his point of view then no longer tenable? What is the system that has superseded his, and what is its attitude towards the history of philosophy? Great philo- sophies do not give place to one another like changes in the fashions. We are apt to think ourselves very new in our ideas compared with our predecessors of ten years ago ; but periods in thought cannot always be counted so rapidly. It will probably take some time yet before Hegel's system is superseded, because it will not be superseded till it has been assimilated in the ordinary thinking of the educated world. Now that is a process which, though slow, has been going on very steadily and yet to a great extent unconsciously. And in the region of philosophy, the special characteristics of our time, the attention given on the one hand to minute psychological investigation, the endeavour to get a genetic account of the individual human mind, and on the other hand the labour expended on the history of institutions and of ideas these two prevailing types of intellectual activity mean that the task which Hegel set to philosophy is being taken very seriously. It is only through more careful study of " subjective mind" and of " objective mind" that we can hope to reach a clearer outlook towards " absolute mind," which is the distant goal of our systematic thinking. In this sense we may accept what Green said about Hegel's work : " It must all be done over again "- 1 And to recur to my special subject the study of past philosophy must be as minute, as scholarly, as possible, if we are to hope to understand the development of thought and to understand our own problems. This sets us an ideal of study which is terribly difficult and may seem unattainable. For we know how we lose sight of the forest in the trees, and how " philology " or minute scholarship and antiqua- rian research are apt to be hostile to that looking at things as a whole which philosophy requires. But we must make 1 1 think he used these very words. The idea, at least, will be found in his review of Principal Caird's Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (reprinted in Green's Works, vol. iu., p. 138 seq.).