way sooner or later is not disengaged all at once,
even from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of
development evolves ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life, and
represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the
whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the
spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined by
the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them
while they contend against it. Weaker minds fail to perceive the
change: the clearest minds abandon themselves to it. To [66] feel the
change everywhere, yet not abandon oneself to it, is a situation of
difficulty and contention. Communicating, in this way, to the passing
stage of culture, the charm of what is chastened, high-strung,
athletic, they yet detach the highest minds from the past, by pressing
home its difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such has been
the charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy and in religion.
It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion with those older
methods of philosophic inquiry, over which the empirical philosophy of
our day has triumphed.

Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the
"relative" spirit in place of the "absolute." Ancient philosophy
sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in
a necessary formula, and the varieties of life in a classification by
"kinds," or genera. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly
known, except relatively and under conditions. The philosophical
conception of the relative has been developed in modern times through
the influence of the sciences of observation. Those sciences reveal
types of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible refinements
of change. Things pass into their opposites by accumulation of
undefinable quantities. The growth of those sciences consists in a
continual analysis of facts of rough and general observation into
groups of facts more precise and minute.

[67] The faculty for truth is recognised as a power of distinguishing
and fixing delicate and fugitive detail. The moral world is ever in
contact with the physical, and the relative spirit has invaded moral
philosophy from the ground of the inductive sciences. There it has
started a new analysis of the relations of body and mind, good and
evil, freedom