And from this necessary connection and progressive order of the various
propositions indicated arise also the resolve, the counsel, the
exhortation, to "return," as they say, to this or that thinker, to this
or that philosophical school of the past. Certainly, such returns are
impossible, understood literally; they are also a little ridiculous,
like all impossible attempts. We can never return to the past, precisely
because it is the past. No one is permitted to free himself from the
problems which are put by the present, and which he must solve with all
the means of the present (which includes in it the means of the past).
Nevertheless, it is a fact that the history of philosophy everywhere
resounds with cries of return. Those very people who in our day deride
the "return to Hume" or the "return to Kant," proceed to advise the
"return to Schelling," or the "return to Hegel." This means that we must
not understand those "returns" literally and in a material way. In
truth, they do not express anything but the necessity and the
ineliminability of the logical process explained above, for which the
affirmations contained in philosophical problems appear connected with
one another in such a way that the one follows the other, surpasses it,
and includes it in itself. Empiricism, practicism, intellectualism,
agnosticism, mysticism, are _eternal stages of the search for truth_.
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