Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/35

 PHILOSOPHY AND THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHERS. 21 philosopher, is not a different method of approaching the study of a philosopher from the philosophical history of which I have been speaking, but implies the same principle carried out into preciser detail. The minute and careful study of the great leaders of political history does not take us away from " the spirit of the age " or the tendencies of " the general mind," but teaches us more about them ; for no man however "original" we may consider him can do anything great, unless he finds a suitable time and place for his special work, i.e., unless in some way or other he repre- sents and expresses his own age and nation. The old con- troversy about great men and their importance as a factor in history was admirably dealt with long ago in the Greek story which Plato tells at the beginning of the Republic (329 E, 330 A). Themistocles was taunted by a native of the insignificant island of Seriphos with owing his fame to the accident of his being an Athenian. " Neither would I," he answered, " being a Seriphian, nor would you being an Athe- nian, have attained greatness." In treating of men of action what we call the " contingent " element, i.e., the element which we cannot yet and may never be able thoroughly to know and understand, bulks very largely ; but, as Hegel points out, in the Introduction to his Lectures, in the history of philosophy the purely personal element does not come in to the same degree as it does in political history. The man who is making a nation may seem to choose sometimes rather arbitrarily, and perhaps from private motives, whether he will enlarge his country by quarrelling with his right hand or his left hand neighbour though such purely personal motives are always a very trivial part of the explanation of great historical events. But the really serious philosopher does not make an arbitrary choice of his problems or of his point of view. He finds his problems determined for him by his age and by the special work of his predecessors ; and his system grows in his mind under the influence of what he honestly takes to be logical necessity. In one sense the problems of philosophy are always the same, because they are simply a few leading questions about the ultimate nature of things; but the particular form which these problems take must vary from age to age, and the great philosophers who serve as landmarks in the course of thought are those who have grasped most clearly the special aspect which the problems have assumed for their own time. Those who have adhered to traditional ways of dealing with the questions or those whose type of thinking is so peculiar and independent as to have no affinity to what is seething in the minds of