Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/57

2 essence of reason must stand forth declared: all that is arbitrary in human thought must disappear; and we must rest on the necessary elements of mind and of the universe. That is the end which philosophy proposes to her votaries, because it is only through this abnegation of particular or optional thinking that universal truth can be attained. This is the end which, on a small scale, must occupy the individual thinker; it is the end which, on a large scale, has occupied all the generations of philosophers from the dawn of speculation until now. Hence, in studying the history of philosophy, we shall find that we are in fact studying only the development of our own reason in its most essential forms, with this difference, that the great problem which, in our minds, is worked out in a hurried manner, and within contracted limits, is evolved at leisure in the history of philosophy, and presented in juster and more enlarged proportions. The history of philosophy is in fact philosophy itself taking its time, and seen through a magnifying-glass.

2. The chief aim of the historian of philosophy ought to be, to give a continuity or organised connection to the different parts of his narrative. But to do this, he must endeavour to verify in his own consciousness, and as the indigenous growth of his own mind, the speculations of antecedent thinkers. He may not agree with these speculations; but he ought, above all things, to understand what they mean—what they are in their spirit, and not merely