And, again, we should reflect that those who ask for final conclusions, forget that the _search_ for truth may be, in and for itself, of the highest spiritual value. The best starting-point for the history of philosophy is a famous passage from Lessing. "Not the truth which is at the disposal of every man, but the honest pains he has taken to come at the truth make the worth of a man. For not through the possession, but through the pursuit of truth do his powers increase, and in this alone consists his ever-increasing perfection. Possession makes us quiet, indolent, proud.... If God with all truth in His right hand, and in His left the single, unceasing striving after truth, even though coupled with the condition that I should ever and always err, came to me and said, 'Choose!' I would in all humility clasp this left hand and say, 'Father, give me this! Is not pure truth for Thee alone?'"[76] But there is another respect in which some knowledge of the history of thought may be an important advantage. It may not bestow upon us the liberty of dogmatising ourselves, but it does bestow upon us a certain imperturbability in the face of the dogmatisms of others. Airs of systematic omniscience, "the pride of a pretended knowledge," will leave us unimpressed and undismayed. The latest pretentious product of popular philosophy will, in the majority of cases, be recognised as an old heresy in a new garb; "new" thought will not impress (at least, by its novelty) those who know that it is old. But it is against the crudities of materialistic naturalism that even a slight acquaintance with the history of ideas will form an antidote. The various exposures of it, from Hume and Kant to Bergson, will be to some extent familiar; and it will be a recognised fact that its chief popular attraction is at the same time its chief philosophic weakness; and this is that it is nothing more or less than a systematisation of the prejudices of common sense. "As a theory of first principles, the best that can be said of its pretensions is that they are ridiculous."[77] SOME DEDUCTIONS FROM HISTORY.--But, it may be asked, what definite conclusions have the foregoing chapters to offer? Some, if we are not mistaken, of a genuinely positive character. It will be necessary to recall certain facts and reflections to the minds of our readers. In the early chapters we noted the rise of an independent science, and the collapse of the medieval world view with which popular religious notions were associated so closely, that many conservative thinkers expected to see both involved in a common ruin. Science seemed to threaten the existence of a religion bound up with conceptions of space and of force which were being brought into discredit.