from Locke to Berkeley is not a matter of chance, but it can hardly be
described as an alternation of opposites or figured to the mind by the
vibrations of a pendulum. Even in Aristotle and Plato, rightly understood,
we cannot trace this law of action and reaction. They are both idealists,
although to the one the idea is actual and immanent,--to the other only
potential and transcendent, as Hegel himself has pointed out (Wallace's
Hegel). The true meaning of Aristotle has been disguised from us by his
own appeal to fact and the opinions of mankind in his more popular works,
and by the use made of his writings in the Middle Ages. No book, except
the Scriptures, has been so much read, and so little understood. The Pre-
Socratic philosophies are simpler, and we may observe a progress in them;
but is there any regular succession? The ideas of Being, change, number,
seem to have sprung up contemporaneously in different parts of Greece and
we have no difficulty in constructing them out of one another--we can see
that the union of Being and Not-being gave birth to the idea of change or
Becoming and that one might be another aspect of Being. Again, the
Eleatics may be regarded as developing in one direction into the Megarian
school, in the other into the Atomists, but there is no necessary connexion
between them. Nor is there any indication that the deficiency which was
felt in one school was supplemented or compensated by another. They were
all efforts to supply the want which the Greeks began to feel at the
beginning of the sixth century before Christ,--the want of abstract ideas.
Nor must we forget the uncertainty of chronology;--if, as Aristotle says,
there were Atomists before Leucippus, Eleatics before Xenophanes, and
perhaps 'patrons of the flux' before Heracleitus, Hegel's order of thought
in the history of philosophy would be as much disarranged as his order of
religious thought by recent discoveries in the history of religion.

Hegel is fond of repeating that all philosophies still live and that the
earlier are preserved in the later; they are refuted, and they are not