or
'reaction', no one but a writer in a 'revolutionary' journal would be
fool enough to use the word as, in itself, an epithet of reproach. Most
persons who have a bowing acquaintance with Mechanics know that you
cannot have an engine in which there is all action and no reaction, and
most sane men can see that before you pronounce a given 'reaction' good
or bad you need to know what it is reacting against. If a man who wants
to go east discovers that he is walking west, he is usually reactionary
enough to go back on his steps.

In short, if we mean to be philosophical, our main concern will be that
our beliefs should be true; we shall care very little whether they
happen to be popular or unpopular with the intellectual 'proletarians'
of the moment, and if we can get at a truth, we shall not mind having to
go back a long way for it. Indeed, when one wants to get on the track of
the most ultimate and important truths of all, there is usually a great
positive advantage in going back a very long way for them. The questions
which deal with first principles, being the simplest--though the
hardest--of all, are mostly raised very simply and directly by Plato and
Aristotle, who were the very first writers to raise them. In the
discussions of later times, the great simple questions about principles
have so often been overlaid by mainly irrelevant accretions of secondary
details that it is usually very hard indeed 'to see the wood for the
trees'. This is the chief reason why one who, like myself, finds it his
main business in life to introduce younger men and women to the study of
Philosophy must think indifference to Greek literature about the worst
misfortune which could happen to our intellectual civilization.

I have tried in what I have said so far to explain what I understand by
the philosophical spirit and what I regard as the primary problems with
which Philosophy has to wrestle. If what I have said is not wholly wide
of the mark, it should be clear what is the deadliest enemy of the true
spirit of Philosophy. It is the temper which is too indolent to think
out a question for itself and consequently prefers to accept traditional
ready-made answers to the problems of Science and Life. Traditionalism,
wherever it is found, is the enemy, because Traditionalism is only
another name for indolence. Observe that I say Traditionalism, not
Tradition. Nowhere in life, and least of all in Philosophy, is the
solitary likely to work t