24 D. G. BITCHIE : PHILOSOPHY AND PHILOSOPHERS. the best of the inevitable. Here, as everywhere, we have an ideal of totality which we cannot complete and which nevertheless regulates our thinking at every step. We each of us must be content to take a great deal at second-hand. There is a sentence of Hegel's which even his most adverse critics may approve. " There are periods," he says, " with regard to which it is to be wished that others had read the works of the philosophers and provided us with extracts." l It is a suggestion that may be applied even to large parts of Hegel's own works and to most of what was produced by his contemporaries. Co-operation can certainly in this way be applied in philosophy, so far as it means a study of philosophers. And this is a matter in which, if I may say so, I think a society such as this and the philosophi- cal journals which are a comparatively new feature in the English-speaking world may do great service to all students of philosophy. "Whoever has made a minute study of any particular philosopher or of any particular philosophical book should put his results in such a shape as to save others from the drudgery he has himself gone through, and in such a shape as to form a trustworthy source of informa- tion for others. It is one of the saddest things to see labo- rious research largely wasted through the results not being put in a convenient and accessible form. My subject has led me to dwell mainly on one aspect of philosophical thought its continuity through different ages. But I should be giving a false conception of what I take to be the business of philosophical thinking, if I did not, in a word at least, refer to the other aspect, to what I may call the subjective or personal aspect of philosophy. Every one must have his own philosophy. We can only face the prob- lems rightly if we face them for ourselves. And for that reason one of the dangers we have to guard against is the scholastic habit of becoming the mere expositors of any one master, however great. For that reason we should welcome the rebels and the doubters, and should value every opportunity of serious discussion with those who have grown up under different influences from those that have moulded ourselves, or who by a long labour of systematic thinking have reached an independent position from which they criti- cise our most cherished judgments about the philosophers of the past. 1 Werke, xiii., p. 128.
