Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GENERAL INTRODUCTION. I. Reason Of Introductory Chapter.—It is desirable that at some stage in the course of his investigations the student of philosophy should be invited to take a brief general survey of the work in which he is engaged. This purpose will be served by a chapter on the general aim and scope of philosophy, its distinctive characteristics as compared with other lines of human thought, and its relations to these latter. Such considerations will at the same time help to define Ontology, thus introducing the reader to the subject-matter of the present volume. II. Philosophy : The Name And The Thing.—In the fifth book of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations we read that the terms philosophus and philosophia were first employed by Pythagoras who flourished in the sixth century before Christ, that this ancient sage was modest enough to call himself not a " wise man " but a " lover of wisdom " ($to?, ero£ta), and his calling not a profession of wisdom but a search for wisdom. However, despite the disclaimer, the term philosophy soon came to signify wisdom simply, meaning by this the highest and most precious kind of knowledge. Now human knowledge has for its object everything that . falls in any way within human experience. It has extensively a great variety in its subject-matter, and intensively a great variety in its degrees of depth and clearness and perfection. Individual facts of the past, communicated by human testimony, form the raw materials of historical knowledge. Then there are all the individual things and events that fall within one's own personal experience. Moreover, by the study of human language (or languages), of works of the human mind and products of human genius and skill, we gain a knowledge of literature, and of the arts—the fine arts and the mech... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.