Produced by Al Haines
1891
All rights reserved
The main purpose which I have had in view in writing this book has beento present an account of Greek philosophy which, within strict limitsof brevity, shall be at once authentic and interesting—authentic, asbeing based on the original works themselves, and not on any secondarysources; interesting, as presenting to the ordinary English reader,in language freed as far as possible from technicality andabstruseness, the great thoughts of the greatest men of antiquity onquestions of permanent significance and value. There has been noattempt to shirk the really philosophic problems which these men triedin their day to solve; but I have endeavoured to show, by a sympathetictreatment of them, that these problems were no mere wars of words, butthat in fact the philosophers of twenty-four centuries ago were dealingwith exactly similar difficulties as to the bases of belief and ofright action as, under different forms, beset thoughtful men and womento-day.
In the general treatment of the subject, I have followed in the mainthe order, and drawn chiefly on the selection of passages, in Ritterand Preller's Historia Philosophiae Graecae. It is hoped that inthis way the little book may be found useful at the universities, as arunning commentary on that excellent work; and the better to aidstudents in the use of it for that purpose, the corresponding sectionsin Ritter and Preller are indicated by the figures in the margin.
In the sections on Plato, and occasionally elsewhere, I have drawn tosome extent, by the kind permission of the Delegates of the ClarendonPress and his own, on Professor Jowett's great commentary andtranslation.
Transcriber's notes:
The passage numbers in the Ritter-Preller book mentioned in the secondparagraph above are indicated in this book with square brackets, e.g."[10]". In the original book they were formatted as sidenotes. Inthis e-book they are embedded in the text approximately where theyappear in the original book, unless they are at the start of aparagraph, in which case they appear immediately before that paragraph.
Page numbers are indicated with curly brackets, e.g. "{5}". They areembedded into the text where page breaks occurred in the original book.
In the original book, pages had headings that varied with the materialbeing discussed on that pair of pages. In this e-book, those headingshave been collected into an "introductory" paragraph at the beginningof each chapter.
The original book uses several Greek words. These words, the chaptersthey are used in, and their transliterations are as follows: