tic consciousness which takes away the power
of estimating its value. No metaphysical enquirer has ever fairly
criticised his own speculations; in his own judgment they have been
above criticism; nor has he understood that what to him seemed to be
absolute truth may reappear in the next generation as a form of logic
or an instrument of thought. And posterity have also sometimes equally
misapprehended the real value of his speculations. They appear to them
to have contributed nothing to the stock of human knowledge. The IDEA
of good is apt to be regarded by the modern thinker as an unmeaning
abstraction; but he forgets that this abstraction is waiting ready for
use, and will hereafter be filled up by the divisions of knowledge.
When mankind do not as yet know that the world is subject to law, the
introduction of the mere conception of law or design or final cause, and
the far-off anticipation of the harmony of knowledge, are great steps
onward. Even the crude generalization of the unity of all things leads
men to view the world with different eyes, and may easily affect their
conception of human life and of politics, and also their own conduct and
character (Tim). We can imagine how a great mind like that of Pericles
might derive elevation from his intercourse with Anaxagoras (Phaedr.).
To be struggling towards a higher but unattainable conception is a more
favourable intellectual condition than to rest satisfied in a narrow
portion of ascertained fact. And the earlier, which have sometimes been
the greater ideas of science, are often lost sight of at a later period.
How rarely can we say of any modern enquirer in the magnificent language
of Plato, that 'He is the spectator of all time and of all existence!'

Nor is there anything unnatural in the hasty application of these vast
metaphysical conceptions to practical and political life. In the first
enthusiasm of ideas men are apt to see them everywhere, and to apply
them in the most remote sphere. They do not understand that the
experience of ages is required to enable them to fill up 'the
intermediate axioms.' Plato himself seems to have imagined that the
truths of psychology, like those of astronomy and harmonics, would be
arrived at by a process of deduction, and that the method which he has
pursued in the Fourth Book, of inferring them from experience and the
use of language, was imperfect and only provisional. But when, after
having arrived at the idea of good, which