But just because the phenomenology of error and the system of the categories are outside time, we must also recognize the fallacy of a history of philosophy which expounds the development of philosophic thought as a successive appearance in time of the various philosophic categories and of the various forms of error. On this view the human race seems to begin to think truly philosophically at a definite moment of time and at a definite point of space; for example at a definite year of the seventh or sixth century before Christ, at a definite point of Asia Minor, with Thales, who surpassing mere fancy posits as a philosophic concept the empirical concept of water; or in another year and place, with Parmenides, who posits the first pure concept, that of being. And it seems further to progress in philosophic thinking with other thinkers, each of whom either discovers a concept or offers a suggestion of one. Thus each takes the other's hand and they form a chain which is prolonged to one who, more audacious and fortunate than the others, gives his hand to the first, and unites them all in a circle. After this, there would remain nothing else to do but to dance eternally, as the stars dance in the imaginations of the poets, without any further necessity to devise suggestions and to risk falling into error. All this is brilliant but arbitrary. The categories are outside time, because they are all and singly in every instant of time, and therefore they cannot be divided and impersonated within empirical and individual limits. It is not true that each philosophic system has for its beginning a particular category or a particular suggestion. A philosophic system, in the empirical signification of the word, is a series of thoughts whose unity is the empirical bond of the life of a definite individual. It is therefore without beginning, since it does not constitute a true unity and refers on the one hand to its predecessors, on the other to those who continue it, and on all sides to its contemporaries. In the strict sense, in that system, in so far as it is philosophic, there is always the whole of philosophy; and therefore, as we have previously seen, all philosophic systems (including materialism and scepticism) have, whether they admit it or not, displayed or implied the same principle, which is the pure concept, and every philosophy is idealism. Nor is it true that there is progress in the history of philosophy, in the sense of the passage from one category to another superior category, or from one suggestion to another superior suggestion. Speaking empirically, we should have in this case to admit regress also, because it is a fact that a return is made to inferior categories and suggestions. Philosophically, we can speak in this case, neither of progress nor of regress, seeing that those categories and suggestions are eternal and outside time.