o much purpose unless he has behind him that
body of organized sound sense which we call Tradition. And I do not mean
that true philosophers are necessarily 'heretics', or that 'orthodoxy'
is less philosophical than 'heterodoxy'. I mean that however true an
'orthodox' proposition may be, it is no living truth for me unless I
have made it my own, as its first discoverer did, by personal labour of
the spirit. The truth is something which each generation must rediscover
for itself. True traditions may be quite as injurious, if they have
become mere traditions, as false ones. It was not so much because the
Aristotelian doctrines were false that the unquestioning acceptance of
Aristotelian formulae all but strangled human thought in the later days
of Scholasticism. Some of these doctrines were false, but many of them
were much truer than anything the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
had to put in their place, and the rediscovery of their real meaning is
perhaps the chief service of the Hegelian school to Philosophy. The
trouble was that mechanical repetition of Aristotle's formulae as
matters of course inevitably led to loss of real insight into the
meaning the formulae had borne for Aristotle.

We may say, generally, that because Traditionalism is the death of sound
thinking, the ages in which the prospects of advance in Philosophy are
brightest are just those in which a powerful historical tradition has
broken down and men feel themselves compelled to go back on their steps
and raise once more the fundamental questions which their fathers had
supposed to be disposed of once for all by a formula. This has happened
twice since the downfall of the degenerate Scholasticism, Protestant and
Roman, of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century the result
was the great movement in Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, of which
Descartes and Galileo are the principal figures. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century, when the doctrines of Descartes had themselves been
traditionalized, the same thing happened again, the leading actors in
the drama being David Hume and Immanuel Kant; the result was first the
revival of the 'critical' problem by Kant, and then the great, if
over-hasty, attempt at a positive interpretation of the Universe which
culminated in the philosophical system of Hegel. In our own age, it is
mainly Kant and Hegel who have been traditionalized, and we seem to be
living through the last stages of the dis