le Ages. No book, except the Scriptures,
has been so much read, and so little understood. The Pre-Socratic
philosophies are simpler, and we may observe a progress in them; but is
there any regular succession? The ideas of Being, change, number, seem
to have sprung up contemporaneously in different parts of Greece and we
have no difficulty in constructing them out of one another--we can see
that the union of Being and Not-being gave birth to the idea of change
or Becoming and that one might be another aspect of Being. Again,
the Eleatics may be regarded as developing in one direction into
the Megarian school, in the other into the Atomists, but there is no
necessary connexion between them. Nor is there any indication that the
deficiency which was felt in one school was supplemented or compensated
by another. They were all efforts to supply the want which the Greeks
began to feel at the beginning of the sixth century before Christ,--the
want of abstract ideas. Nor must we forget the uncertainty of
chronology;--if, as Aristotle says, there were Atomists before
Leucippus, Eleatics before Xenophanes, and perhaps 'patrons of the
flux' before Heracleitus, Hegel's order of thought in the history
of philosophy would be as much disarranged as his order of religious
thought by recent discoveries in the history of religion.

Hegel is fond of repeating that all philosophies still live and that the
earlier are preserved in the later; they are refuted, and they are not
refuted, by those who succeed them. Once they reigned supreme, now they
are subordinated to a power or idea greater or more comprehensive
than their own. The thoughts of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle have
certainly sunk deep into the mind of the world, and have exercised an
influence which will never pass away; but can we say that they have
the same meaning in modern and ancient philosophy? Some of them, as
for example the words 'Being,' 'essence,' 'matter,' 'form,' either
have become obsolete, or are used in new senses, whereas 'individual,'
'cause,' 'motive,' have acquired an exaggerated importance. Is the
manner in which the logical determinations of thought, or 'categories'
as they may be termed, have been handed down to us, really different
from that in which other words have come down to us? Have they not
been equally subject to accident, and are they not often used by Hegel
himself in senses which would have been quite unintelligible to their
original inventor