Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/17

 It seems to offer a possible clue to the mighty labyrinth within which we still wander almost without hope.

The men who succeed in organizing any scheme of general thought, in such a way as to command the attention of all those in the civilized world who devote themselves to philosophy and to science, are so infinitely few—the resources needed even to attempt such a task are so complex and so rare—their labours are so precious to the advancement of human thought, that we judge their work to be worthy of study and honour, even if we find manifest errors in certain parts, and they fail to satisfy their generation. Consider the sophisms now acknowledged to ruin some of the most famous philosophies of the past. Remember how small after all is the residuum of permanent truth accepted as the contribution to human thought of the most illustrious thinkers of old. For some two thousand years the noble Utopia of Plato has been an armoury of pregnant ideas to the religious and speculative conceptions of the entire West. We can smile at his exquisite fantasies and his airy hypotheses—yet we ponder him with delight, and refashion his gorgeous cloudland again and again—amicus Plato sed magis arnica veritas. On what wings of unstable wax did the two Bacons essay to rise into the empyrean and face the Sun of truth! How puerile seem to us now Descartes' vortices and not a little in Hume's arid dogmatism and in Hegel's paradoxical transcendentalism with its identity of contradictories. And withal, how great and how just is the reputation of these men!

The truly general syntheses are so extraordinarily few in the history of the human mind, they lead to such wide and unexpected results when they stir the interest of the philosophic world, that any substantial