Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/32

8 courage, of our devotion; but the alliance is not always one intended directly by the spirit of curious inquiry itself. A singular craft of our nature links the most theoretical sorts of inquiry by unexpected ties with men’s daily business. One plays with silk and glass and amber, with kites that one flies beneath thunder clouds, with frogs’ legs and with acids. The play is a mere expression of a curiosity that former centuries might have called idle. But the result of this play recreates an industrial world. And so it is everywhere with our deeper curiosity. There is a sense in which it is all superfluous. Its immediate results seem but vanity. Oue could surely live without them; yet for the future, and for the spiritual life of mankind, these results are destined to become of vast import. Without this cunning contrivance of our busy brains, with their tireless curiosity and their unpractical wonderings, what could even sound instinct and the enduring heart have done to create the world of the civilized man?

Of all sorts of curiosity one of the most human and the most singular is the reflective curiosity whose highest expression is philosophy itself. This form of curiosity scrutinizes our own lives, our deepest instincts, our most characteristic responses to the world in which we live, our typical “reflex actions.” It tries to bring us to a self-consciousness as to our temperaments. Our temperaments, our instincts, are in one sense fatal. We cannot directly alter them. What philosophy does is to find them out, to bring them to the light, to speak in words the very essence of them. And so the historical office of the greatest philosophers has always been to reword, as it were, the meaning and the form of the most significant life, temperaments, and instincts of their own age. As man is social, as no man lives alone, as your temperament is simply the sum total of your social “reflex actions,” is just your typical bearing towards your fellows, the great philosopher, in reflecting on his own deepest instincts and