Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/494

484 to work to some purpose. Assuming your philosophy to be true, as I am of course entitled to do, inasmuch as I have supposed your idea of it to be right, you can now breathe into the old systems the breath of your living thoughts, and the old bones will come to life; for in all genuine speculative thinking there is the closest intercommunion, if people would but see it, between the living and the dead. Pythagoras will be no longer remote, and it will seem but yesterday since Parmenides threw off the garb of his mortality. Plato will speak to you like a familiar friend; his ideas, so far from being unintelligible, will now come before us as the only intelligibilities in the heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth; and Aristotle's hard technicalities, dry and uninteresting no longer, will be found fertile with the germs of the profoundest and most inexhaustible speculative knowledge. To repeat this in one word—to apply the rule rightly, you must have a correct and clear conception of philosophy itself. In order to deal effectually with the history of philosophy, in order to derive any benefit from it as students, and in order to confer any benefit on it as historians, we must, first of all, be philosophers ourselves.

2. This is a new position. We have hitherto been considering the history of philosophy, and the rule by which we must be guided either in studying or in writing it. The consideration of these points has