es 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."

[Sidenote: ALL ADOPT THE HISTORIC METHOD]

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.[81] Since Cuvier first recognised the conjunction between the
course of inductive discovery and the course of civilization,[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.

[Sidenote: DANGER OF OBLIVION]

[Sidenote: PROPHECY OF PITT]

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 sig