Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/21

 PHILOSOPHY AND THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHEES. 7 in which Hume's clear-sightedness had placed Locke's em- piricism, makes his " Copernican " change and tries the hypothesis of mind acting upon the material given to it even Kant thinks he is introducing an absolutely new method into philosophy. Like Locke, though in a less degree, he tends to ignore his predecessors ; and as a consequence he carries over into his theory of knowledge the mysterious " thing-in-itself," which seems to be a mixture of the scholastic " substance " with the Leibnizian " monad ". He accepts, moreover, an absolute division between the intelli- gible and the phenomenal world, which is an inheritance from the Platonic doctrine that Aristotle had criticised in the Metaphysics, and that Plato himself had criticised in the Parmcnides. I do not mean that the thought of the world would necessarily have gained if Bacon and Descartes, Locke and Kant, had devoted themselves to writing com- mentaries on Aristotle. There are times when a violent revolution seems to be needed in order to effect a reform, whether in thought or in politics or in religion ; and the revolutionary leader cannot be expected to be always just to the past or to see his own work in correct historical perspec- tive. I have referred to these four revolutionary thinkers simply as illustrations, to show how difficult or impossible it is to escape the idola theatri, while attempting to give an account of experience without a clear and explicit conscious- ness of the history of the metaphysical ideas which have become embedded like fossils in the language of ordinary life and the habits of ordinary thinking. We may distinguish three main attitudes towards the doctrines of older philosophers. First, there is the attitude of submission to authority. Of this the most fully developed example is to be found in Scholasticism ; but it was a habit of thought which had already shown itself in pre-Christian times in the Alexandrian period and even earlier. The reverence for the written word which contains the doctrine of the great teacher leads even the most gifted and original thinkers to put their ideas in the form of commentary on the sayings of the master. Discussion, however much free- dom it may actually attain, takes the guise of rival interpre- tations of the same authority or of disagreement in the weight assigned to different authorities or to different elements of the same doctrine. It is a manner of philosophical dis- cussion which is apt to arise wherever famous names have won a widespread veneration. Plato makes Socrates use it ironically when, instead of frankly asserting that Simonides the poet (and these old poets were the Greek " Bible ") was