PHILOSOPHY AND THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHERS. 11 reason why we should expect to find such a general corre- spondence between the logical and the historical order. The earlier systems are not, as used to be held and as was still held by many in his day, the depositories of a higher and purer wisdom to which later generations must look back. He would indeed agree with Bacon about the reputed wis- dom of the ancients: " Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi". The earlier systems are the poorest, the emptiest, the most ab- stract. They give crude and one-sided answers to a vaguely put question about the underlying principle of things, and it is only through the conflict of opposing systems that the discussion of the problem gradually became more adequate. Thus Plato's philosophy is an attempt to get beyond the one-sided theories of Eleatics and Heracleiteans, while recog- nising the element of truth in each of these opposing systems. And it is Plato, too, who calls philosophy " dia- lectic," and comes in his great metaphysical dialogues to occupy himself precisely with what Hegel calls logical cate- gories, while always keeping in view the historical contro- versies that had preceded him. Hegel sought to arrange the concepts of our ordinary and of our scientific thinking in their logical order, i.e., to proceed from abstract to con- crete, and to show how the dialectical antinomies into which our reason inevitably falls are no argument for complete philosophical agnosticism, but only prove the necessity of struggling to get beyond one-sided and superficial views of things and of trying to see them in the totality of their complex relationships to one another. He, therefore, ex- pected to find traces of a similar dialectic movement in the long labour of the human mind throughout the ages. Nor are we to suppose, as the language of many of Hegel's critics might suggest, that he turned away like Descartes from the world of books and from the world of men and spun his complete system of logic out of his own inner consciousness and then sought with this fanciful cobweb to entrap the living universe. His early studies were chiefly devoted to Greek literature ; and it was undoubtedly in the history of Greek thought, as he read it, that he found a main reason for rearranging and supplementing and " objectifying " the categories which German philosophy had inherited from Kant. Hegel's History of Philosophy and his Logic may both be open to many criticisms ; but one criticism is quite un- fair, viz., that he brought a ready-made dogmatic system to the interpretation of preceding philosophies, enslaving facts to his logic. His Logic is in great part the outgrowth of his historical studies, and represents the inferences he had drawn
