A MODERN UTOPIA
mind for ever—blank Comte-ism, in fact, of the blankest description. But indeed the science of logic and the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as a final expression of the human mind than the Scottish Longer Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost formless embryo that must presently develop sight and form and power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied.[1]
All through this Utopian excursion, I must warn you, you shall feel the thrust and disturbance of that insurgent movement. In the reiterated use of "Unique," you will, as it were, get the gleam of its integument; in the insistence upon individuality and the individual difference as the significance of life, you will feel the texture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed!—there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his back on truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals. Heraclitus, that lost and misinterpreted giant, may perhaps be coming to his own. . . .
- ↑ The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick's "Use of Words in Reasoning" (particularly), and to Bosanquet's "Essentials of Logic," Bradley's "Principles of Logic," and Sigwart's "Logik"; the lighter-minded may read and mark the temper of Professor Case in the British Encyclopædia, article "Logic" (vol. XXX). I have appended to this book a rude sketch of a philosophy upon the new lines, originally read by me to the Oxford Phil. Soc. in 1903.
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