[Transcriber's Notes]
This text is derived from a copy in the Ave Maria University library, catalog number "B 171 .S8"
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book.
[End Transcriber's Notes]
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
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1920
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GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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This book contains the substance, and for the most part the words, ofa course of public lectures delivered during the first three months of1919. The original division into lectures has been dropped, the matterbeing more conveniently redivided into chapters.
The audience to whom the lectures were delivered was composed ofmembers of the general public, and not only of students. For the mostpart they possessed no previous knowledge of philosophy. Hence thisbook, like the original lectures, assumes no previous specialknowledge, though it assumes, of course, a state of general educationin the reader. Technical philosophical terms are carefully explainedwhen first introduced; and a special effort has been made to putphilosophical ideas in the clearest way possible. But it must beremembered that many of the profoundest as well as the most difficultof human conceptions are to be found in Greek philosophy. Such ideasare difficult in themselves, however clearly expressed. No amount ofexplanation can ever render them anything but difficult to theunsophisticated mind, and anything in the nature of "philosophy madeeasy" is only to be expected from quacks and charlatans.
Greek philosophy is not, even now, antiquated. It is not from thepoint of view of an antiquary or historian {vi} that its treasures arevaluable. We are dealing here with living things, and not with meredead things--not with the dry bones and debris of a bygone age. And Ihave tried to lecture and write for living people, and not for merefossil-grubbers. If I did not believe that there is to be found here,in Greek philosophy, at least a measure of the truth, the truth thatdoes not grow old, I would not waste five minutes of my life upon it.
"We do not," says a popular modern writer, [Footnote 1] "bring theyoung mind up against the few broad elemental questions that are thequestions of metaphysics.... We do not make it discuss, correct it,elucidate it. That was the way of the Greeks, and we worship thatdivine people far too much to adopt their way. No, we lecture to ouryoung people about not philosophy but philosophers, we put themthrough book after book, telling how other people have discussed thesequestions. We avoid the questions of metaphysics, but we deliversemi-digested half views of the discussions of, and answers to thesequestions made by men of all sorts and qualities, in various remotelanguages and under conditions quite different from our own. . . . Itis as if we began teaching arithmetic by long lectures