Introduction.

§ 1.

1. LOOKED at from the subjective standpoint, Philosophy is nothing more than the effort of discursive thought to reach the highest and ultimate reasons of all things that are, in the measure in which this end is attainable by mere reason. The task which the human mind undertakes in this study is very vast and very difficult. For this reason it lay in the nature of things that Philosophy should not reach its perfect development at a bound -- that in the course of centuries many thinkers should set themselves to the solution of the great problem, and should devote the power of intellect allotted them to attain, as best they could, the end of philosophical inquiry. In this way the course of time has brought forth many philosophical systems. Each of these represents the labour which its author has expended in the investigation of the ultimate reasons of things that are, and the results he has attained by this inquiry.

2. The philosophical systems with which the history of the human race confronts us are not only many in number; they furthermore differ from one another as well in Matter as in Form. The sum of truth is greater in one than in another; and some seem in this respect to have failed altogether; some systems are of wider comprehensive range, taking in the whole domain of speculative thought; others are devoted to a special field of philosophical inquiry; some are, in their arrangement, rigidly systematic -- in others the several parts seem loosely bound together, the effort after system is not prominently apparent. If we seek the reasons of this diversity, we shall find them, partly in the great range and difficulty of the task which Philosophy sets the human mind, partly in the different points of view adopted by the several thinkers, and partly in extrinsic conditions -- in the influences exercised upon the several thinkers by the circumstances in which they lived.

3. In spite, however, of this diversity we find a certain inner connection between the several philosophical systems which succeed one another in time. The results attained by earlier philosophers were not lost upon those who succeeded them. The latter made the theories of their predecessors part of their own systems, when they held them to be satisfactorily established. If they considered them insufficiently proved, or wholly false, they set up in opposition to them other principles which appeared to them more tenable. Thus there came to be established a certain intrinsic order of connection between the successive systems, corresponding to the extrinsic order of succession in time. One philosophical system refers us to another, and each can be understood in its full significance only in connection with others to which it stands immediately related

Pre-Scholastic Philosophy.