6 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
majestically alone upon its way: as if this stage parade were
the symbol suited to truth, which is thought itself, and, as
thought, ever active and in labour. Indeed, nobody succeeds
in exposing a truth, save by criticising the different solutions
of the problem with which it is connected; and there is no
philosophical treatise, however weak, no little scholastic
manual or academic dissertation, which does not collect at
its beginning or contain in its body a review of opinions, his-
torically given or ideally possible, which it wishes to oppose
or to correct. This fact, though frequently realised in a
capricious and disorderly manner, just expresses the legiti-
mate desire to pass in review all the solutions that have been
attempted in history or are possible of achievement in idea
(that is, at the present moment, though always in history),
in such a way that the new solution shall include in itself all
the preceding labour of the human spirit.
But this demand is a logical demand, and as such intrinsic
to every true thought and inseparable from it; and we must
not confound it with, a definite literary form of exposi-
tion, in order that we may not fall into the pedantry for
which the scholastics of the Middle Ages and the dialec-
ticians of the school of Hegel in the nineteenth century be-
came celebrated, which is very closely connected with
the formalistic superstition, and represents a belief in the
marvellous virtue of a certain sort of extrinsic and mechan-
ical philosophical exposition. We must, in short, understand
it in a substantial, not in an accidental sense, respecting the
spirit, not the letter, and proceed with freedom in the ex-
position of our own thought, according to time, place, and
person. Thus, in these rapid lectures intended to provide as
it were a guide to the right way of thinking out problems of
art, I shall carefully refrain from narrating (as I have done