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that he was arguing from the necessary imperfection of language against the
most certain facts. And here, again, we may find a parallel with the
ancients. He goes beyond facts in his scepticism, as they did in their
idealism. Like the ancient Sophists, he relegates the more important
principles of ethics to custom and probability. But crude and unmeaning as
this philosophy is, it exercised a great influence on his successors, not
unlike that which Locke exercised upon Berkeley and Berkeley upon Hume
himself. All three were both sceptical and ideal in almost equal degrees.
Neither they nor their predecessors had any true conception of language or
of the history of philosophy. Hume's paradox has been forgotten by the
world, and did not any more than the scepticism of the ancients require to
be seriously refuted. Like some other philosophical paradoxes, it would
have been better left to die out. It certainly could not be refuted by a
philosophy such as Kant's, in which, no less than in the previously
mentioned systems, the history of the human mind and the nature of language
are almost wholly ignored, and the certainty of objective knowledge is
transferred to the subject; while absolute truth is reduced to a figment,
more abstract and narrow than Plato's ideas, of 'thing in itself,' to
which, if we reason strictly, no predicate can be applied.

The question which Plato has raised respecting the origin and nature of
ideas belongs to the infancy of philosophy; in modern times it would no
longer be asked. Their origin is only their history, so far as we know it;
there can be no other. We may trace them in language, in philosophy, in
mythology, in poetry, but we cannot argue a priori about them. We may
attempt to shake them off, but they are always returning, and in every
sphere of science and human action are tending to go beyond facts. They
are thought to be innate, because they have been familiar to us all our
lives, and we can no longer dismiss them from our mind. Many of them
express relations of terms to which nothing exactly or nothing at all in
rerum natura corresponds. We are not such free agents in the use of them