th
thoughtful attention.

One thing should be emphasized at the outset: nothing will so often
bear rereading as the history of philosophy. When we go over the
ground after we have obtained a first acquaintance with the teachings
of the different philosophers, we begin to realize that what we have in
our hands is, in a sense, a connected whole. We see that if Plato and
Aristotle had not lived, we could not have had the philosophy which
passed current in the Middle Ages and furnished a foundation for the
teachings of the Church. We realize that without this latter we could
not have had Descartes, and without Descartes we could not have had
Locke and Berkeley and Hume. And had not these lived, we should not
have had Kant and his successors. Other philosophies we should
undoubtedly have had, for the busy mind of man must produce something.
But whatever glimpses at the truth these men have vouchsafed us have
been guaranteed by the order of development in which they have stood.
They could not independently have written the books that have come down
to us.

This should be evident from what has been said earlier in this chapter
and elsewhere in this book. Let us bear in mind that a philosopher
draws his material from two sources. First of all, he has the
experience of the mind and the world which is the common property of us
all. But it is, as we have seen, by no means easy to use this
material. It is vastly difficult to reflect. It is fatally easy to
misconceive what presents itself in our experience. With the most
earnest effort to describe what lies before us, we give a false
description, and we mislead ourselves and others.

In the second place, the philosopher has the interpretations of
experience which he has inherited from his predecessors. The influence
of these is enormous. Each age has, to a large extent, its problems
already formulated or half formulated for it. Every man must have
ancestors, of some sort, if he is to appear upon this earthly stage at
all; and a wholly independent philosopher is as impossible a creature
as an ancestorless man. We have seen how Descartes (section 60) tried
to repudiate his debt to the past, and how little successful he was in
doing so.

Now, we make a mistake if we overlook the genius of the individual
thinker. The history of speculative thought has many times taken a
turn which can only be accounted for by taking into consideration the
genius for reflective thou