interesting little sketch, disclosing for the first time the fact that human thought has a history, and that there was a time when the word “cause,” for instance, had never been heard, and pointing to the conclusion that every abstract word which we use is the result of the theories, and perhaps the controversies, of former ages. Aristotle traces the thoughts of successive Grecian thinkers, advancing under a law, while each stage at which they arrived forced them on to the next (see ‘Met.,’ I, iii. 11), from about 600 B.C. to about 330 B.C. And this task had never been again so well accomplished until Hegel gave his first set of lectures on the History of Philosophy, at Jena, in 1805. Hegel was followed in the same field by Brandis, Schwegler, Ueberweg, Cousin, Renouvier, Ferrier, Zeller, and many others, to whose works we must refer for information as to the Greek philosophers. Suffice it to say, that Aristotle’s method of procedure is to take his own doctrine of the Four Causes (see above, p. 72), and to show how at first philosophers only got hold of the idea of a Material Cause, and that afterwards they gradually arrived at the idea of Motive Power, Form, and End, or Final Cause. On the whole, his brief and masterly sketch, while full of points of light, is open to the charge of not doing sufficient justice to the views of his predecessors. Among them all, he seems most highly to appreciate Anaxagoras, of whom he says that, by introducing the idea of Reason among the causes of the existence of the world, he was “like a sober man beginning to speak amidst a party of drunkards.” Aristotle repeats
