The philosophy which each one of us professes at a determinate moment, in so far as it is adequate to the knowledge of facts and in the proportion in which it is adequate, is the result of all preceding history, and in it are organically brought together all systems, all errors and all suggestions. If some error should appear to be inexplicable, some suggestion without fruit, some concept incapable of adoption, the new philosophy is to that extent more or less defective. But the organic reconciliation, which preceding philosophies must find in those that follow, cannot be the bare bringing them together in time, and _eclecticism,_ as in those superficial spirits, who associate fragments of all philosophies without mediation. Eclecticism (from the historical point of view also, as for instance in the relation of Victor Cousin to Hegel, whom he admired, imitated and failed to understand) is the falsification or the caricature of the vastness of thought, which embraces in itself all thoughts, though apparently the most diverse and irreconcilable. The peace of the lazy, who do not collide with one another, because they do not act, must not be made sublime and confounded with the lofty peace that belongs to those who have striven and have fraternized after strife, or, indeed, during the actual combat. [Sidenote: _Researches concerning the authors and precursors of truths: and the reason for the antinomies which they exhibit._] A proof of this _constancy_ of philosophy, which is immanent in all philosophies and in all the thoughts of men, and also of its perpetual variation and novelty of historical form, is to be found in the questions that have been and are raised, concerning the _origin_ or _discovery_ of truth. Hardly has the truth been discovered, when the critics easily succeed in proving that it was already known, and begin the search for _precursors._ And there can be no doubt that they are right and their researches deserve to be followed up. Every assertion of discovery, in so far as it seems to make a clear cut into the web of history, has something arbitrary about it. Strictly speaking, Socrates did not discover the concept, or Vico æsthetic fancy, or Kant the _a priori_ synthesis, or Hegel the synthesis of opposites; nor even perhaps, did Pythagoras discover the theorem of the square on the hypotenuse, or Archimedes the law of the displacement of liquids. If a discovery is represented as an explosion, this happens for reasons of practical and mnemonic convenience in narrating and summarising history; and, for that matter, the explosion, the eruption and the earthquake are continuous processes. But the rational side of the search for precursors must not cause the acceptance of the irrational side, which is the denial of the _originality_ of discoveries, as though they were to be found point for point in the precursors, or as though they consisted only in the aggregation of elements which