PHILOSOPHY AND THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHERS. 17 one system to another. Thus in Met. L, 3, 15, 984 a 18, he writes avro TO Trpdy/J-a (oSoTroir/aev avTois Kal crvirrjvd'yKacre tyreiv, which amounts to recognising that the individual thinker is led on to a fresh stage by the logical necessities of the problem itself. And, again, a few lines farther on ( 21, 984 b 9), VTT' airr% T>7<? aXyOeias dt>ayKa6/j,ei>oi rr/v ^ofj,vijv efyirrjaav ctp^v, i.e., the principles follow one another in a necessary sequence (rrjv e-^ofievrjv dp^rjv), and thought is inevitably led on (dvaytca^ofjievoi) from one step to the next in logical order. In any philosophical interpretation of his- tory purely chronological sequence must be put aside for logical sequence, philosophical history being something other than annals ; and thus we find Aristotle placing Anaxagoras after Empedocles as the more advanced thinker, though younger in age (Met. I., 3, 13, 984 a 12. In the context this is the only meaning that can be put upon rot? B' 6/370*9 ita-repos applied to Anaxagoras.) Hegel's treatment of the history of philosophy is then no audacious eccentricity of his own, but a development of what his studies of Greek philosophy and what the example of Aristotle suggested to him. Moreover, we may say, in Aris- totle's words, that he was led to it as the inevitable next step by truth herself, that is to say, by the special truth which it fell to his age to recognise and proclaim. In passing from Kant to Hegel we pass from the period which culminated in the French Revolution to the period of reconstruction after the abstract and essentially unhistorical rationalism of the eighteenth century. 1 Hegel's attitude to history is no iso- lated phenomenon. On his own principles of interpretation he is significant simply because in the department of philo- sophical thought he gave express formulation to ideas which were at work in his age. Goethe and Sir Walter Scott * are conspicuous representatives of that movement of thought and sentiment which has made the nineteenth century so different from the eighteenth. And if we contrast Auguste Comte with Voltaire, we have another example of the subtle intellectual revolution which has changed so many of the categories through which we apprehend the past. We often 1 Though, as has been already pointed out (p. 13, note), Hegel was never carried off his feet by the wave of reaction, like the Romanticists, Mediae- valists, and other supporters of obscurantism and absolutism among his contemporaries. 2 Hegel calls Scott " seichter Kopf" (Bosenkranz's Leben, p. 560), because of some of his moralisings about the French Revolution. But it was not by his Life of Napoleon that Scott helped to create the new historical spirit of studying institutions and ideas. 2
