pre-existed, or in like insignificant changes of form. To attach oneself to precursors, does not mean to repeat them, but to continue their work. This continuation is always new, original, and creative and always gives rise to discoveries, be they small or great. To think is to discover. The reduction to absurdity of the wrong meaning of the search for precursors is to be found in the fact that every one of the most important thoughts can be discovered in a certain sense in common beliefs, in proverbs, in ways of speech, and among savages and children. This is so much the case that by this path we can return to the Utopia of an _ingenuous_ philosophy, outside history; whereas philosophy is truly ingenuous or genuine only when it _is,_ and it is not, save in History. [Footnote 1: See above, Part II. Chap. III.] [Footnote 2: See ch. ix. _What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel,_ by the Author, English translation by Douglas Ainslie.] VIII "DE CONSOLATIONE PHILOSOPHIAE" [Sidenote: _Logic and the defence of philosophy._] Attacks upon Philosophy and defences of it have been made as more or less academic exercises. But the true defence of it can only be Philosophy itself, and above all, Logic, which, by determining the concept of Philosophy, recognizes its necessity and function. And since Logic itself teaches that a concept is not truly known, save in the system where it is shown in all its relations, the complete defence is obtained in our opinion only, when this treatise dedicated to _Logic_ is placed in relation to the preceding, which treats of _Æsthetic,_ and with that which follows and has for its object the _Philosophy of the practical._ [Sidenote: _The utility of Philosophy and the philosophy of the practical._] To this last must be relegated the complete elucidation of the problem concerning the utility or non-utility of philosophy. It is a problem about which We can here raise no fundamental question, if the equation posited by us be true: philosophy = thought = history = perception of reality. Thus the doubt concerning the utility of philosophy would be of equal value with the extravagant doubt as to the utility of knowledge. The philosophy of the practical also demonstrates that no action is possible, save when preceded by knowledge, and that presupposed in action there is always historical or perceptive knowledge, that is, the knowledge which contains in itself all other knowledge. And it also demonstrates that reality, being always will and action, is always thought, and that therefore thought is not an extrinsic adjunct, but an intrinsic category constitutive of the Real. Reality is action, because it is thought, and it is thought because it is action. [Sidenote: _Consolation of philosophy, as joy in thought and in the truth. Impossibility of a pleasure arising from falsity or illusion._]