An Introduction to Philosophy | Page 5

of its knowledge is

arrived at. Observation precedes reflection. When we come to think
definitely about the mind, we are all apt to make use of notions which
we have derived from our experience of external things. The very
words we use to denote mental operations are in many instances taken
from this outer realm. We "direct" the attention; we speak of
"apprehension," of "conception," of "intuition." Our knowledge is
"clear" or "obscure"; an oration is "brilliant"; an emotion is "sweet" or
"bitter." What wonder that, as we read over the fragments that have
come down to us from the Pre-Socratic philosophers, we should be
struck by the fact that they sometimes leave out altogether and
sometimes touch lightly upon a number of those things that we regard
to-day as peculiarly within the province of the philosopher. They
busied themselves with the world as they saw it, and certain things had
hardly as yet come definitely within their horizon.
2. THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY AT ITS HEIGHT.--The next
succeeding period sees certain classes of questions emerge into
prominence which had attracted comparatively little attention from the
men of an earlier day. Democritus of Abdera, to whom reference has
been made above, belongs chronologically to this latter period, but his
way of thinking makes us class him with the earlier philosophers. It
was characteristic of these latter that they assumed rather naïvely that
man can look upon the world and can know it, and can by thinking
about it succeed in giving a reasonable account of it. That there may be
a difference between the world as it really is and the world as it appears
to man, and that it may be impossible for man to attain to a knowledge
of the absolute truth of things, does not seem to have occurred to them.
The fifth century before Christ was, in Greece, a time of intense
intellectual ferment. One is reminded, in reading of it, of the splendid
years of the Renaissance in Italy, of the awakening of the human mind
to a vigorous life which cast off the bonds of tradition and insisted
upon the right of free and unfettered development. Athens was the
center of this intellectual activity.
In this century arose the Sophists, public teachers who busied
themselves with all departments of human knowledge, but seemed to

lay no little emphasis upon certain questions that touched very nearly
the life of man. Can man attain to truth at all--to a truth that is more
than a mere truth to him, a seeming truth? Whence do the laws derive
their authority? Is there such a thing as justice, as right? It was with
such questions as these that the Sophists occupied themselves, and such
questions as these have held the attention of mankind ever since. When
they make their appearance in the life of a people or of an individual
man, it means that there has been a rebirth, a birth into the life of
reflection.
When Socrates, that greatest of teachers, felt called upon to refute the
arguments of these men, he met them, so to speak, on their own ground,
recognizing that the subjects of which they discoursed were, indeed,
matter for scientific investigation. His attitude seemed to many
conservative persons in his day a dangerous one; he was regarded as an
innovator; he taught men to think and to raise questions where, before,
the traditions of the fathers had seemed a sufficient guide to men's
actions.
And, indeed, he could not do otherwise. Men had learned to reflect, and
there had come into existence at least the beginnings of what we now
sometimes rather loosely call the mental and moral sciences. In the
works of Socrates' disciple Plato (428-347 B.C.) and in those of Plato's
disciple Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), abundant justice is done to these
fields of human activity. These two, the greatest among the Greek
philosophers, differ from each other in many things, but it is worthy of
remark that they both seem to regard the whole sphere of human
knowledge as their province.
Plato is much more interested in the moral sciences than in the physical,
but he, nevertheless, feels called upon to give an account of how the
world was made and out of what sort of elements. He evidently does
not take his own account very seriously, and recognizes that he is on
uncertain ground. But he does not consider the matter beyond his
jurisdiction.
As for Aristotle, that wonderful man seems to have found it possible to
represent worthily every science known to his time, and to have marked

out several new fields for his successors to cultivate. His philosophy
covers physics, cosmology, zoölogy, logic, metaphysics, ethics,
psychology, politics and economics, rhetoric and poetics.
Thus we see that the task of the philosopher was