None of the great thinkers, from Pythagoras down to Hegel, has left metaphysics where he found it. Yet none can be said to have built on the foundations of his predecessors in the same way as the mathematicians and physicists and chemists have added to the edifice they found. What the philosophers have done is to accumulate materials for the study of man’s faculties and modes of thinking, and of his ideas regarding his relations to the universe, while also indicating various methods by which the study may be pursued. Each great product of speculative thought is itself a part of these materials, and for that reason never becomes obsolete, as the treatises of the old physicists and chemists have mostly become. Aristotle, for instance, has left us books on natural history, on metaphysics and ethics, and on politics. Those on natural history are mere curiosities, and no modern biologist or zoologist needs them. Those on metaphysics and ethics still deserve the attention of the student of philosophy, though he may in a certain sense be said to have got beyond them. The treatise on politics still keeps its place beside Montesquieu, Burke, and Tocqueville. Or, to take a thinker who like Aristotle seems very far removed from us, though fifteen hundred years later in date, St. Thomas of Aquinum discusses questions from many of which the modern world has moved away, and discusses them by methods which many do not now use, starting from premises which many do not accept. But he marks a remarkable stage in the history of human thought, and as a part of that history, and as an example of extraordinary dialectical ingenuity and subtlety, he remains an object of interest to those least in agreement with his conclusions.
Every Great Thinker Affects Others
Every great thinker affects other thinkers, and propagates the impulse he has received, though perhaps in a quite different direction. The teaching of Socrates was the starting point for nearly all the subsequent schools of Greek philosophy. Hume became the point of departure for Kant, who desired to lay a deeper foundation for philosophy than that which Hume seemed to have overturned. All these great ones have not only enriched us, but are still capable of stimulating us. But they have not improved our capacity for original thinking. The accumulation of scientific knowledge has, as already observed, put all mankind in a better position for solving further physical problems and establishing a more complete dominion over Nature. The accumulation of philosophic thought has had no similar effect. In the former case each man stands, so to speak, on the shoulders of his predecessors. In the latter he stands on his own feet. The value of future contributions to philosophy will depend on the original power of the minds that make them, and only to a small extent (except by way of stimulus) on what such minds may have drawn from those into whose labours they have entered.
Ebb-Tides of Intellectual Culture
When we come to the products of literary and artistic capacity, we find an even vaster accumulation of intellectual treasure available for enjoyment, but a still more marked absence of connection between the amount of treasures possessed and the power of adding fresh treasures to them. Since writing came into use, and, indeed, even in the days when memory alone preserved lays and tales, every age and many races have contributed to the stock. There have been ebbs and flows both in quantity and quality. The centuries between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1100 have left us very little of high merit in literature, though something in architecture; and the best of that little in literature did not come from the seats of Roman civilisation in Italy, France, Spain, and the East Roman Empire.
Some periods have seen an eclipse of poetry, others an eclipse of art or a sterility in music. Literature and the arts have not always flourished together, and musical genius in particular seems to have little to do with the contemporaneous development of other forms of intellectual power. The quantity of production bears no relation to the quality, not even an inverse relation; for the pessimistic notion that the larger the output the smaller is the part which possesses brilliant excellence, has not been proved. Still less does the amount of good work produced in any given area depend upon the number of persons living in that area. Florence, between A.D. 1250 and A.D. 1500 gave birth to more men of first-rate poetical and artistic genius than London has produced since 1250; yet Florence had in those two and a half centuries a population of probably only from forty to sixty thousand. And Florence herself has since A.D. 1500 given birth to scarcely any distinguished poets or artists, though her population has been larger than it was in the fifteenth century.
Mansell
THE MIND OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Aristotle (B.C. 384–322) whose influence is greater in some lines than that of St. Thomas of Aquinum, who represents mediæval thought, 1500 years later.