Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Is the Order of Nature Opposed to the Moral Life?: An Inaugural Address Delivered in the University of Glasgow on October 23rd, 1894
I AM glad to believe, as I assume the responsibilities which have been laid upon me, that those of you who have known Mr. Caird will not withhold your sympathy from his successor. I do not intend to estimate either his services to this University, or his contribution to philosophic thought: the time for that has not yet come, I rejoice to say. The power of his spoken word is not yet spent, his work is still before him, and the light of his teaching is broadening as the years pass. And besides, the main conceptions on which he based his life and which he applied to the interpretation of man's duty and destiny, are not of a character that admits of a summary estimate. They can neither be refuted nor accepted in a day. Great thoughts live; they have a way Of catching new meanings from the minds they mould, and their immortality is due to their power of changing with the times they educate. We do not order our conduct now according to the Ethics of Aristotle, nor our civic affairs according to the Republic of Plato; but we have not refuted them. Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Hume, Kant and Hegel are not there either for mere refutation, or for mere appropriation, any more than are the great poets, or the peaks of the Grampians. There is room for us to roam at large within the domain of their ideas, and we shall do wisely in being disciples of them all.
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