history of philosophy as there seems to be in other pursuits of the human mind, for example, science or technique.
The question which we are going to ask tonight is “Will this chaos that has existed so far continue to exist in the future?” Will philosophers go on contradicting each other, ridiculing each other's opinions, or will there finally be some kind of universal agreement, a unity of philosophical belief in the world?
All of the great philosophers believed that with their own systems a new epoch of thinking had begun, that they, at least, had discovered the final truth. If they had not believed this they could hardly have accomplished anything. This was true of Descartes, for instance, when he introduced the method which made him “the father of modern philosophy,” as he is usually called; of Spinoza when he tried to introduce the mathematical method into philosophy; or even of Kant when he said in the preface to his greatest work that from now on philosophy might begin to work as securely as only science had worked thus far. They all believed that they had been able to bring the chaos to an end and start something entirely new which would at last bring about a rise in the worth of philosophical opinions. But the historian cannot usually share such a belief; it may even seem ridiculous to him.
We want to ask the question, “What will be the future of philosophy?” entirely from the point of view of the philosopher. However, to answer the question we shall have to use the method of the historian because we shall not be able to say what the future of philosophy will be except in so far as our conclusions are derived from our knowledge of its past and its present.
The first effect of a historical consideration of philosophical opinions is that we feel sure we cannot have any confidence in any one system. If this is so - if we cannot be Cartesians, Spinozists, Kantians, and so forth - it seems that the only alternative is that we become skeptics, and we become inclined to believe that there can be no true system of philosophy because if there were any such system it seems that at least it must have been suspected and would have shown itself in some way. However, when we examine the history of philosophy honestly, it seems as if there were no traces of any discovery that might lead to unanimous philosophical opinion.
