But a progressive change of the laws of thought, to the effect that we must now hold to a proposition which at another time we should naturally reject as untenable, can be maintained only upon the supposition that the thought of evolution has driven all others out of the intellect. It would be absurd to hold that the same view could be true at one time and false at another, that the same views about the world and life could be right to-day and wrong to-morrow, to be accepted to-day and rejected to-morrow. A view is either true or false. If true, it is always true and warranted. Or was old _Thales_ right when he declared the world to consist of water; were _Plato_ and _Aristotle_ right in maintaining that it consisted of ideas, or forms, with real existences; was _Fichte_ and his time right with his Ego, and are finally _Schopenhauer_, _Wundt_, and _Paulsen_ right in claiming the world to be the work of the will? Were our heroic ancestors right, as the theories of evolution claim, in holding that trees are inhabited by ghosts; were then the Greeks right with their idea of a host of gods dwelling in the Olympus; and later on, was the civilized world right in holding that there is but one God, a personal one; and, after that, are many others of to-day right when they tell us that the world, and nature itself, is god? These are conclusions that threaten confusion to the human brain. And yet they are the logical consequences of “relative truth,” and any one reluctant to accept these consequences would prove thereby that he has never realized what absurdities are marketed as relative truth. Or shall we give it up, as entirely impossible, to judge of the truth or falseness of doctrines and views? Are we to value them only so far as they are adapted to a period, and as moulding and benefiting that period? This opinion indeed is held. “The values of science and philosophy,” says _Paulsen_, “of our arts and poetry, consist in what they give us; whether a distant future will still use them is very questionable. Scholastic philosophy has passed away; we use it no longer; that is, however, no proof against its value; if it has made the generations living in the latter half of the Middle Ages more intelligent and wise ... then it has done all that could rightfully be expected of it: having served its purpose, it may be laid with the dead: there is no philosophy of enduring value.” “Whatever new ideas a people produces from its own inner nature will be beneficial to it. Nature may be confidently expected to produce here and everywhere at the right time what is proper and necessary” (System der Ethik, 8th ed., 1906, I, 339, _seq._, II, 241).