Philosophy.

Philosophy. In a subject where opinion has been and is still so much divided, as is the case in philosophy, it would be vain to attempt to formulate a definition which would be accepted by every one. The objects of the science, its methods, nay, its very possibility, are still matter of debate between divergent schools. The historical method is our only safe guide in such a case; and by its aid we are happily able to fix upon the main elements that were present to the minds of the Greek thinkers who first consciously used the term with a specific meaning. Practically the first attempts at definition are to be found in Plato and Aristotle, and as these two philosophers dominated the human intellect for two thousand years, the ideas which they expressed on the subject inevitably shaped the conception of philosophy current during that time. In virtue of its long lease of life, this conception has established itself in the associations of language, and is vaguely present to the man of ordinary culture when he uses the term. It may claim, therefore, to be the historical sense of the term—the sense, that is to say, which the historian of civilisation would single out as that which has persistently asserted itself during more than two millennia of human progress. Pronounced deviations from the accepted usage occur mainly in connection with a sceptical or quasi-sceptical theory of knowledge, and will be noticed in their place.

Tradition assigns the first employment of the word to Pythagoras, and makes him use it to signify merely the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Socrates plays upon the etymology of the word when he contrasts the modesty of the truth-seeker with the more arrogant pretensions of the sophists. But, so far, the nature of the truth or knowledge which the philosopher seeks is not specified; the term is still vague and general. In fact, no kind of knowledge was at first alien to the philosopher. Philosophy has been truly called 'the mother of the sciences,' and it was only by slow degrees that the separate sciences attained an independent life. As specialisation proceeded, however, philosophy could no longer in a literal sense 'take all knowledge to be her province'; the details of one department after another of existence were surrendered to the scientific specialist. But the claim of philosophy to be the necessary complement of the special sciences—the only science of existence or of the universe as a whole—was not thereby surrendered. The specialist, so far as he is a mere specialist, is like the man who cannot see the wood for the trees; he loses sight of the proportions of the whole in the details of his own province. The co-ordination of the sciences, the unification of knowledge, is a task which remains to be undertaken by the philosopher. Unity or harmony in our conception of the universe is the aim which philosophy always has in view. Whether this aim is attainable by man or not is a further question; but the idea of a system of things satisfactory to the reason and the moral sense remains the inexhaustible spring of philosophic effort. The philosopher, therefore, has always his eye upon the Whole; his true function is to correct the abstractions of the special sciences. Each science makes, and must make, its own working postulates or presuppositions, and the specialist is ever prone to make the working postulates of his own department the measuring-line of existence as such. But philosophy has to review all these scientific postulates, and if possible to harmonise their conflicting claims by showing the relative and limited validity which belongs to each. Philosophy is in this connection the critic of the sciences—of the postulates which they make and the conceptions which they use; and she exercises this critical office in the interest of the Whole. Something like this was present to Plato's mind when he described the philosopher as sunoptikós, a man who insists on seeing things together, who refuses to consider the parts out of their relation to the whole whose parts they are, and who is therefore the inexorable foe of crude and premature generalisations from this or the other department of investigation which happens for the time to be most in evidence.

In Plato we find, however, already established a second account of philosophy, which, though unquestionably true in itself, has led, in the opinion of the present writer, to many questionable developments. The philosophers, says Plato, 'are those who are able to grasp the eternal and immutable,' 'those who set their affections on that which in each case really exists.' The philosopher, as the man who apprehends and follows after the essence or reality of things, is thus opposed to the man who dwells in appearances and the shows of sense. This distinction may be said to be implied in the demand for any explanation at all, and is present in Greek philosophy from the beginning. What is the substance or unitary reality underlying all the diversity of the world around us? So ran the question which the early Greek thinkers asked themselves; and the explicit opposition between the world as it appears to sense and the world as reason recognises it to be had already appeared in the systems (otherwise diametrically opposed) of Parmenides and Heraclitus. In the Platonic doctrine of transcendent Ideas the opposition receives a questionable expression; it appears more legitimately in the Aristotelian doctrine of Substance and Cause. The philosopher, indeed, must always continue to ask himself, What is the essence, the ultimate reality of things? who or what is the Being that is manifested in 'all thinking things, all objects of all thought?' In this sense philosophy is still definable, in Aristotle's phrase, as Ontology, the science of being as being.

To very many, however, in modern times the search for this ultimate reality seems a hopeless quest, and philosophy therefore, in the form of metaphysics or ontology, is condemned by them as a disease of the human spirit, from which, under the influence of scientific habits of thought, it is now happily recovering. The Empiricism which bases itself on Hume, the Positivism which finds on Comte, and various phases of Kantian thought agree in this repudiation of metaphysics. The distinction between phenomena and noumena has been revived in a somewhat different form, and has become current in popular thought. Sensible objects and their laws may be known, it is argued, because in such an investigation we are not carried beyond the facts of present and possible experience; they are phenomena. But if we refuse to take this sensuous phantasmagoria simply as it stands—if we insist on referring it to some ultimate ground of existence as an explanation of why and how there is a phenomenal world at all—the object of our search is variously said to be noumenal, metaphysical, metempirical, or transcendental, and to be unattainable by human reason. To those who hold this view philosophy becomes convertible with Epistemology or Theory of Knowledge (Erkenntnis-theorie). It becomes an 'inquiry into the human understanding,' or a 'criticism' of the forms and categories of human thought, by way of fixing the limits of our necessary ignorance, and thus justifying the negative position assumed towards metaphysics. To Hume and Comte, and to Kant himself in some of his moods, philosophy is thus a preventive against itself, or at least against what has ordinarily been understood by philosophy. In Hume's words: 'We must submit to this fatigue, in order to live at ease ever after; and must cultivate true metaphysics with some care in order to destroy the false and adulterate.'

This sceptical or positivistic theory, however, is chiefly the result of the unwarrantable separation of essence and appearance, of noumena and phenomena, which has been already referred to as an unfortunate outcome of Plato's way of stating the philosophic problem. If the noumenal reality is something transcendent, something apart from the world we know, and as it were hidden behind it, then it must inevitably drift into the position of a perfectly otiose thing-in-itself, which has no function to discharge in the universe of knowledge. Whether we then continue to assert its existence, as an Unknown and Unknowable, or take up a purely sceptical position in regard to it, is really of little moment. In both cases the limitation of knowledge to phenomena is justified by the false definition of the essence or noumenon from which the theories in question start. But the noumenon is not a transcendent entity apart from the phenomenon: it is simply the phenomenon itself fully understood. To know only phenomena would be to rest content with the immediate appearances of sense. All science is an attempt to go beyond the immediate appearance, and to understand it by connecting it with something else. Ultimately no one thing can be fully understood except in the light of the whole; so to understand things is to reach their metaphysical reality, to see them sub specie eternitatis. Following out this line of thought, the modern philosopher oftener gives his question a teleological than an ontological form. Instead of asking what is the ultimate essence, he asks what is the ultimate meaning, the ultimate end, of the universe. Has it a rational and satisfying end? Does it exist to express a meaning at all, or simply as a brute fact? But end, meaning, and ultimate reality are only different ways of formulating the same problem.

But even those modern philosophers who combat most strongly this sceptical view of the inherent impossibility of reaching metaphysical truth agree in laying great stress on what has recently come to be called Epistemology or Theory of Knowledge. The question of knowledge and the relation of knowledge to reality has stood in the foreground of modern philosophy since Locke. It is evidently fundamental and preliminary, for on the trustworthiness of my knowledge and its power of putting me in communication with independent trans-subjective realities depend all my further investigations. If my results in the theory of knowledge are sceptical, I have no foothold in the world of reality to serve as basis for metaphysical construction. The sceptic and positivist therefore stop short at this point; but the philosopher who believes that he has reached a satisfactory doctrine of knowledge (or belief, as he sometimes prefers to call it) advances to metaphysics proper, or the theory of the ultimate nature of the real which he believes himself to apprehend in knowledge.

The general term Philosophy, though occasionally, as has been said, identified with Epistemology, and more frequently with Metaphysics, has in common usage a wider application. Besides these central disciplines it embraces what may be called the philosophical sciences, such as Logic, Ethics, Aesthetics, Psychology, Sociology, the Philosophy of Law, the Philosophy of Religion, and the Philosophy of History. Some of these, however, have two sides, and may be treated either as positive sciences or as parts of philosophy. Psychology, by which is understood what was formerly called Empirical

Psychology, may be said to have established its claim to be an independent science of observation and experiment. But, though it may fall more and more into the hands of specialists, it will always remain connected with philosophy, seeing that the knowing mind is the object which the psychologist investigates. Similarly, Ethics is often treated as the natural history of moral ideas and institutions or of the moral sense, but so conceived it really forms a part of scientific psychology. The strictly philosophical part of Ethics is the theory of obligation, and this is sometimes spoken of as the Metaphysic of Ethics. The meaning assigned to duty and the explanation given of it must of necessity profoundly influence the general conception we may form of the universe. So, again, Aesthetics may be treated as a department of physiological psychology, as has mostly been the case in England; but by many continental writers the Philosophy of Art or the Philosophy of the Beautiful has been intimately connected with metaphysics. Jurisprudence on its philosophical side is closely connected with Ethics, and is sometimes spoken of as the Philosophy of Law. The Philosophy of History and the Philosophy of Religion exist only so far as there can be traced in the facts of history and in the different religions of man the evolution of an idea or purpose. Logic, as the science of the regulative laws of thought, forms a part of the general theory of knowledge. It holds aloof, however, from the central question of Epistemology. It presupposes the relation of our thought to reality, but does not itself investigate that relation, confining itself to the laws by which we may validly pass from one statement to another. It occupies a propædæutic or introductory position in relation to philosophy, and indeed in relation to scientific thought generally.

The History of Philosophy forms not the least important philosophical discipline. Philosophy cannot, indeed, be profitably studied apart from the history of its own development. Speculative thought has flourished in India and elsewhere, but to all intents and purposes the history of philosophy begins with Thales in Greece about 600 B.C. It is usual to distinguish three great periods of philosophic thought—Ancient or Greek Philosophy, from 600 B.C. to about 500 A.D.; Mediæval Philosophy, lasting till 1600; and Modern Philosophy, since that date. Greek Philosophy is in turn divided into three periods—that of the pre-Socratic philosophers (say 600 to 425 B.C.), who devoted their attention mainly to the phenomena of external nature. Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras were the most eminent heads of mutually conflicting schools. The Sophists and Socrates raised the question of knowledge, turning man's attention upon himself; and in the idealistic systems of Plato and Aristotle (say 400–322 B.C.) we have the great age of Greek philosophy. In Aristotle the theoretic impulse of the Greek mind seems to have exhausted itself, and the post-Aristotelian or third period of Greek philosophy was mainly inspired by practical need, by the desire for a theory of life and conduct. The Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, and later the Neoplatonists with their religious mysticism, carry on the tradition of philosophy till the downfall of the Roman empire and the death of Boethius. After the so-called dark ages Mediæval Philosophy may be said to begin in the 9th century with John Scotus Erigena, who is really a Christian Neoplatonist. Mediæval philosophy is mainly the application of the Aristotelian logic to the doctrines of the church, and latterly (when the other treatises of Aristotle became known in western Europe) exhausted itself in an elaborate attempt to harmonise the philosophy of Aristotle with

Christian theology. Anselm and Abelard in the earlier period, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham in the later, are probably the greatest and most representative names of the Scholastic philosophy. The Renaissance put an end to Scholasticism, and led, in the 15th and 16th centuries, to various attempts to revive the systems of the older philosophers and to strike out new paths; but the age was one of transition, and no effective beginning was made in Modern Philosophy till the commencement of the 17th century. Bacon's Novum Organum was published in 1620 and Descartes' Discourse on Method in 1637. Bacon's investigations were mainly logical and methodological, and Descartes was the real founder of modern philosophy. Cartesianism was developed on the Continent into the great monistic system of Spinoza, from which the monadistic or individualistic theory of Leibnitz was a reaction. In England philosophy took an epistemological and even psychological direction with Locke, and this was continued by Berkeley and Hume, who developed Locke's dualism into subjective idealism and scepticism respectively. Hume's sceptical analysis of knowledge gave rise by revulsion to the Critical philosophy of Kant, which combines elements both from the Continental and the English line of thought. From it sprang the idealistic developments of German thought in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and also the realistic systems of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. Herbart and Lotze represent a realism of a more individualistic cast, which affiliates itself directly to Leibnitz, and is comparatively little influenced by Kantian thought. Scottish philosophy has maintained the reality of knowledge and the dualism of experience in answer to the scepticism of Hume, but like English philosophy generally has been mainly psychological in character. It offers in this way no parallel to the vast metaphysical systems which have succeeded one another in Germany.

The best general histories of philosophy are by Erdmann, Ueberweg, and Schweger, all accessible in English translations. The greater part of Zeller's exhaustive history of Greek philosophy has also been translated. See also the following articles, and works there cited: