CHAPTER I.

PHILOSOPHY DEFINED.

§ 35. AFTER concluding that we cannot know the ultimate nature of that which is manifested to us, there arise the questions-What is it that we know? In what sense do we know it? And in what consists our highest knowledge of it? Having repudiated as impossible the Philosophy which professes to formulate Being as distinguished from Appearance, it becomes needful to say what Philosophy truly is not simply to specify its limits, but to specify its character within those limits. Given a certain sphere as the sphere to which human intelligence is restricted, and there remains to define the peculiar product of human intelligence which may still be called Philosophy.

In doing this, we may advantageously avail ourselves of the method followed at the outset, of separating from conceptions that are partially or mainly erroneous, the element of truth they contain. As in the chapter on "Religion and Science," it was inferred that religious beliefs, wrong as they might individually be in their particular forms, nevertheless probably each contained an essential verity, and that this was most likely common to them all; so in this place it is to be inferred that past and present beliefs respecting the nature of Philosophy, are none of them wholly false, and that that in which they are true is that in which they agree. We have here, then, to do what was done there" to compare all opinions of the same genus; to set aside as more or

less discrediting one another those various special and concrete elements in which such opinions disagree; to observe what remains after the discordant constituents have been eliminated; and to find for this remaining constituent that abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent modifications,"

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§ 36. Earlier speculations being passed over, we that among the Greeks, before there had arisen any notion of Philosophy in general, apart from particular forms of Philosophy, the particular forms of it from which the general notion was to arise, were hypotheses respecting some universal principle that constituted the essence of all concrete kinds of being. To the question-"What is that invariable existence of which these are variable states ?" there were sundry answers-Water, Air, Fire. A class of hypotheses of this all-embracing character having been propounded, it became possible for Pythagoras to conceive of Philosophy in the abstract, as knowledge the most remote from practical ends; and to define it as "knowledge of immaterial and eternal things:""the cause of the material existence of things," being, in his view, Number. Thereafter, we find continued a pursuit of Philosophy as some ultimate interpretation of the Universe, assumed to be possible, whether actually reached in any case or not. And in the course of this pursuit, various such ultimate interpretations were given as that "One is the beginning of all things;" that "the One is God;" that "the One is Finite;" that "the One is Infinite;" that "Intelligence is the governing principle of things;" and so on. From all which it is plain that the knowledge supposed to constitute Philosophy, differed from other knowledge in its transcendent, exhaustive character.

In the subsequent course of speculation, after the Sceptics had shaken men's faith in their powers of reaching such transcendent knowledge, there grew up a much-restricted conception of Philosophy. Under Socrates,