OF THE SPIRIT. 361 



and interest of reality. No English thinker has ever 

 honestly believed or maintained that the Truly Eeal 

 can be fathomed or exhausted by the thinking process ; 

 nor has any English thinker ever unwaveringly believed 

 in the complete unification of knowledge. For most 

 English thinkers, even for the greatest, there has there- 

 fore remained a larger or smaller undissolved residue of 

 facts and interests which they have not touched, be 

 it that this has consciously presented itself to them 

 as the Unknowable, or that it has tacitly remained in 

 the background of their speculations as a not clearly 

 defined conviction from which they have nevertheless 

 derived a feeling of strength and security. With no 

 thinker has this been more clearly the case than with 

 Francis Bacon, who, to many Englishmen, is still a 

 kind of philosophical model, and, more than any other 

 among English heroes of thought, marks them off in 

 type from continental nations. 



A third characteristic of English thought is its want 

 of continuity, its individualism. We have here no long 

 array of systems following one out of the other either by 

 direct contrast and reaction or by slow development, no 

 lengthy trains of reasoning such as Descartes started in 

 France, Leibniz and after him Kant in Germany, and 

 Spinoza for the general community of continental 

 thinkers. If such trains of reasoning have been 52 

 started by thinkers in this country, as Locke, Hume, ideas' 8 



. developed 



and Darwin, they have usually been consistently abroad, 

 followed up, not here, but abroad, where no hesitation 

 has existed to admit and express the most extreme and 

 daring of ultimate logical consequences. From these 



