Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/40

World Spirit who lives and moves in all things. Then surely this life, which in our world needs both the antelopes and the tigers to embody its endless vigor, that life which the frost and cold, the ice and snow, do bless and magnify, is not a life which any one experience can exhaust. All the philosophers are needed, not merely to make jarring assertions about it, but to give us embodiments now of this, now of that fragment of its wealth and its eternity. And in saying this I don’t counsel you in your study of philosophy merely to jumble together all sorts of sayings of this thinker and of that, and then to declare, as makers of eclectic essays and of books of extracts love to say, “This is all somehow great and true.” What I mean is that, apart from the private whims and the non-essential accidents of each great philosopher, his doctrine will contain for the critical student an element of permanent truth about life, a truth which in its isolation may indeed contradict the view of his equally worthy co-workers, but which, in union, in synthesis, in vital connection with its very bitterest opposing doctrines, may turn out to be an organic portion of the genuine treasure of humanity. Nobody hates more than I do mere eclecticism, mere piecing together of this fragment and that for the bare love of producing fraudulent monuments of philosophic art. But the fact is that, frauds aside, the god-like form of truth exists for us men, as it were, in statuesque but scattered remnants of the once perfect marble. Through the whole ruined world, made desolate by the Turks of prejudice and delusion, the philosophers wander, finding here and there one of these bits of the eternal and genuine form of the goddess. Though I hate fraudulent restorations of a divine antiquity, still I know that, notwithstanding all, these fragments do somehow belong together, and that the real truth is no one of the bits, but is the whole goddess. What we who love philosophy long for is no piece-work, but that matchless whole itself.