s their own people. Remember Darwin taking
note only of those passages that raised difficulties in his way;
the French philosopher complaining that his work stood still,
because he found no more contradicting facts; Baer, who thinks
error treated thoroughly nearly as remunerative as truth, by the
discovery of new objections; for, as Sir Robert Ball warns us, it
is by considering objections that we often learn #75. Faraday
declares that "in knowledge, that man only is to be condemned and
despised who is not in a state of transition." And John Hunter
spoke for all of us when he said: "Never ask me what I have said
or what I have written; but if you will ask me what my present
opinions are, I will tell you."

From the first years of the century we have been quickened and
enriched by contributors from every quarter. The jurists brought
us that law of continuous growth which has transformed history
from a chronicle of casual occurrences into the likeness of
something organic #76. Towards 1820 divines began to recast their
doctrines on the lines of development, of which Newman said, long
after, that evolution had come to confirm it #77. Even the
Economists, who were practical men, dissolved their science into
liquid history, affirming that it is not an auxiliary, but the
actual subject-matter of their inquiry #78. Philosophers claim that,
as early as 1804, they began to bow the metaphysical neck beneath
the historical yoke. They taught that philosophy is only the
amended sum of all philosophies, that systems pass with the age
whose impress they bear #79, that the problem is to focus the rays of
wandering but extant truth, and that history is the source of
philosophy, if not quite a substitute for it #80. Comte begins a
volume with the words that the preponderance of history over
philosophy was the characteristic of the time he lived in. Since
Cuvier first recognised the conjunction between the course of
inductive discovery and the course of civilisation #82, science had
its share in saturating the age with historic ways of thought,
and subjecting all things to that influence for which the
depressing names historicism and historical-mindedness have been
devised.

There are certain faults which are corrigible mental defects on
which I ought to say a few denouncing words, because they are
common to us all. First: the want of an energetic understanding
of the sequence and real significance of events, which would be