40 
Dr. Caird has given continuity in the history of western 
philosophy to the body of idealism which assumed its primitive 
shape in the hands of Plato and Aristotle, and arrived at its 
critical ultimate in the systems of Kant and Hegel; with him the 
real is the rational and the rational is the real. The direction and 
movement of Dr. Caird’s thoughts, as we follow them through all 
his works, could not be better or more forcibly expressed than in 
his own words: ‘‘'lhe movement of philosophy,’’ he says, ‘is a 
movement towards a more complex and, at the same time, 
towards a more systematic view of the world; philosophical 
thought is ever seeking on the one hand to distinguish and even 
to oppose to each other the different sides of truth which were at 
first confused together, and again, on the other hand, to show 
what were at first supposed to be contradictory are really compli- 
mentary aspects of things. (a) 
This then is the trend of his philosophy, and the postulate 
by the constant application of which he attempts to resolve all 
difficulties and reconcile all opposites. It is a unity which is at 
once self-differentiating and self-interpreting, which manifests 
itself in difference that through that difference it may return upon 
itself. What we are never permitted to forget, in all sections of 
Dr. Caird’s works, is the fact that he is a critic, but a critic in no 
narrow and ambiguous sense ; he is a critic in the sense in which 
all true philosophers are and must be critics, as Socrates, Plato 
and Aristotle are critics, and as Kant himself, the renowned 
author of the Critical Philosophy, was a critic; for it must be 
borne in mind that philosophy, as it is represented in history, is 
not merely a continuous stream of human thought, but a series of 
progressions followed by critical regressions to the original fountain 
in view of farther progress. A great thinker may begin his career 
by simply absorbing the thought of others ; but afterwards he 
becomes the critic of what he has absorbed, and the very moment 
he becomes the critic of what he has absorbed he strikes fire as it 
were, he finds something he objects to in what he has absorbed, - 
but he also finds that the thoughts of others which he has 
absorbed have a deeper meaning and a fuller content than the 
authors themselves perhaps ever dreamt of. ‘his deeper meaning 
and this fuller content the critic, who is also the philosopher, unfolds 
with the result that he adds something new, something positive, and 
something permanent to the intellectual resources of mankind. 
Now this is exactly what Dr. Caird has done; he has not gone 
outside the great stream of thought, but has painfully and 
laboriously wrought inside the current, and done original work of 
a permanent character, by detecting and discarding the errors in 
the systems of others, and making fresh discoveries himself, by a 

(a) Comte, p. 84. 
