The Continuity of Philosophy

Extract

The history of philosophy is certainly not the uniform and regular development of a primal seed; there are breaks, irregularities, off-shoots. Yet it is true that we cannot legitimately reduce it to a mere welter of mutually exclusive ideas, to a mere swarm of watertight systems. We shall look in vain for complete breaks. The past cannot but reach over into the present and in some sense perpetuate itself. Period shades off into period gradually and the pressure of what has gone before leaves an indelible mark on the present. Thus all would agree now that we cannot admit a decisive and unbridgeable gulf between the scholasticism of the close of the Middle Ages and the philosophy that succeeded. It is true that the age of Descartes is an age of revolt throughout a great part of Europe, but this very fact precludes the possibility of a complete new beginning, since that age of which the philosopher may be said to be a spokesman by its very contrast and opposition to the preaching age is largely determined and coloured by the past.