GROWTH AND DIFFUSION OF CRITICAL SPIRIT. 95 



I will at once answer this question. The great 

 change referred to is owing to the growth and diffusion 

 of the Critical Spirit, taking this term, as I shall 

 immediately proceed to show, in its widest sense. In 

 order that my readers may have before them as clear 

 an idea as possible of the main drift of the second 

 part of this History, 1 may say that its principal 

 object will be to exhibit the workings of the critical 

 spirit and the critical methods, just as the main object 

 of the first part was to exhibit the workings of the 

 scientific or exact spirit and methods. In doing so I 

 shall follow a similar plan to that adopted in the first 

 part : trying first to trace the growth and diffusion of the 

 critical spirit in general, leaving it to separate chapters to 

 deal with the separate results which the application of the 

 critical methods has brought about in the various courses 

 in which philosophical thought has habitually moved. 



Critical 

 spirit. 



thought, I remember, haunted me 

 on hearing, for example, the logic 

 lectures of the late Lewis Nettle- 

 ship. He told us elaborately and 

 often what knowledge was not, but 

 having thus awakened expectation, 

 he did little to satisfy it : we 

 seemed to be always on the verge 

 of a great secret which our teacher 

 would never disclose. T. H. Green, 

 whose ' Prolegomena to Ethics ' I 

 read somewhat later, was much 

 more definite than Nettleship : but 

 even his great doctrine of the 

 Spiritual Principle, though it grati- 

 fied religious aspiration, did not 

 seem to be clearly reasoned out ; 

 nor could any one be sure how far 

 it would go in explaining the re- 

 ligious consciousness. Meanwhile, 

 no open - minded student, I am 

 certain, was quite at ease about 

 the attitude of the Oxford Idealists 



to modern science. . . . The want 

 of receptivity, together with its 

 own limited explanatory power, 

 cast upon the Oxford philosophy of 

 1885 a suspicion of reactiouism and 

 unreality which even an eager 

 disciple could scarcely ignore " 

 (pp. 1. 2). "The net result for 

 Oxford of this remarkable litera- 

 ture, which together with much 

 exegetical work of a similar tend- 

 ency shows the highest speculative 

 quality, was that philosophy went 

 down seriously in academic con- 

 sideration from the position which 

 it held at Green's death. The 

 man of average calibre took more 

 and more to commentating : and 

 an Alexandrian period threatened 

 to set in," &c., &c. (p. 3). This 

 is almost identical with Prof. 

 Wundt's well-known dictum, "Wir 

 sind Alle Epigonen." 



