details, some genius appears to simplify it and force our thoughts back
to the fundamental question. This advance in problems, which happily is
everywhere manifested by unmistakable signs, is, in the case of many of the
questions which irresistibly force themselves upon the human heart, the
only certain gain from centuries of endeavor. The labor here is of more
value than the result.

In treating the history of philosophy, two extremes must be avoided,
lawless individualism and abstract logical formalism. The history
of philosophy is neither a disconnected succession of arbitrary
individual opinions and clever guesses, nor a mechanically developed series
of typical standpoints and problems, which imply one another in just the
form and order historically assumed. The former supposition does violence
to the regularity of philosophical development, the latter to its vitality.
In the one case, the connection is conceived too loosely, in the other, too
rigidly and simply. One view underestimates the power of the logical Idea,
the other overestimates it. It is not easy to support the principle that
chance rules the destiny of philosophy, but it is more difficult to avoid
the opposite conviction of the one-sidedness of formalistic construction,
and to define the nature and limits of philosophical necessity. The
development of philosophy is, perhaps, one chief aim of the world-process,
but it is certainly not the only one; it is a part of the universal aim,
and it is not surprising that the instruments of its realization do not
work exclusively in its behalf, that their activity brings about results,
which seem unessential for philosophical ends or obstacles in their way.
Philosophical ideas do not think themselves, but are thought by living
spirits, which are something other and better than mere thought
machines--by spirits who live these thoughts, who fill them with personal
warmth and passionately defend them. There is often reason, no doubt, for
the complaint that the personality which has undertaken to develop some