itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times
over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the
new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which
familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the
form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as
in all other products of art, form, in the full signification of that
word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing.

There are three different ways in which the criticism of philosophic,
of all speculative opinion whatever, may be conducted. The doctrines
of Plato's Republic, for instance, may be regarded as so much truth or
falsehood, to be accepted or rejected as such by the student of to-day.
That is the dogmatic method of criticism; judging every product of
human thought, however alien [9] or distant from one's self, by its
congruity with the assumptions of Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or Hegel,
according to the mental preference of the particular critic. There is,
secondly, the more generous, eclectic or syncretic method, which aims
at a selection from contending schools of the various grains of truth
dispersed among them. It is the method which has prevailed in periods
of large reading but with little inceptive force of their own, like
that of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonism in the third century, or the Neo-
Platonism of Florence in the fifteenth. Its natural defect is in the
tendency to misrepresent the true character of the doctrine it
professes to explain, that it may harmonise thus the better with the
other elements of a pre-conceived system.

Dogmatic and eclectic criticism alike have in our own century, under
the influence of Hegel and his predominant theory of the ever-changing
"Time-spirit" or Zeit-geist, given way to a third method of criticism,
the historic method, which bids us replace the doctrine, or the system,