master the ideas of Gratry before entering upon the study of the more detailed but less philosophically comprehensive treatises of the other writers referred to above. As a matter of fact, neither Babbage nor Boole could have done what he did had he not perceived the truth of some principle analogous to that of Gratry.
And there is no greater hindrance to human progress than lack of piety towards Humanity's best teachers. The statement may be considered a truism; but unfortunately we are all too prone to neglect truisms. Principles so self-evident that no one disputes them, occupy less attention than do theories about which it is possible to get up a controversy; and the settlement of a fierce dispute is often best effected by insisting on the practical recognition of some principle which everybody concerned is disregarding, precisely because nobody has attempted to deny its truth. I repeat:—
There is no greater hindrance to progress than lack of piety towards great teachers; this is well shown by the whole history of Logic since the publication of Gratry's Logique in 1855.
Any Seer of a great comprehensive Truth, such as Gratry, is necessarily ahead of his age. He may be, in a sense, appreciated by his contemporaries; that is to say, he may be loved for his goodness, and admired because of certain secondary results of the intellectual Vision which has been vouchsafed to him; but the very essence of such a man's position is that he is seeing truths for which the world around him is not yet ready. When Gratry was writing his Logic, he was looking through the intellectual débacle which was then only beginning, and beyond it, to the new-created thought-
