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as we sometimes imagine. Fixed ideas have taken the most complete
possession of some thinkers who have been most determined to renounce them,
and have been vehemently affirmed when they could be least explained and
were incapable of proof. The world has often been led away by a word to
which no distinct meaning could be attached. Abstractions such as
'authority,' 'equality,' 'utility,' 'liberty,' 'pleasure,' 'experience,'
'consciousness,' 'chance,' 'substance,' 'matter,' 'atom,' and a heap of
other metaphysical and theological terms, are the source of quite as much
error and illusion and have as little relation to actual facts as the ideas
of Plato. Few students of theology or philosophy have sufficiently
reflected how quickly the bloom of a philosophy passes away; or how hard it
is for one age to understand the writings of another; or how nice a
judgment is required of those who are seeking to express the philosophy of
one age in the terms of another. The 'eternal truths' of which
metaphysicians speak have hardly ever lasted more than a generation. In
our own day schools or systems of philosophy which have once been famous
have died before the founders of them. We are still, as in Plato's age,
groping about for a new method more comprehensive than any of those which
now prevail; and also more permanent. And we seem to see at a distance the
promise of such a method, which can hardly be any other than the method of
idealized experience, having roots which strike far down into the history
of philosophy. It is a method which does not divorce the present from the
past, or the part from the whole, or the abstract from the concrete, or
theory from fact, or the divine from the human, or one science from
another, but labours to connect them. Along such a road we have proceeded
a few steps, sufficient, perhaps, to make us reflect on the want of method
which prevails in our own day. In another age, all the branches of
knowledge, whether relating to God or man or nature, will become the
knowledge of 'the revelation of a single science' (Symp.), and all things,
like the stars in heaven, will shed their light upon one another.