PHILOSOPHY AND PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES.
Philosophy is a general term whose meaning and scope have varied very considerably according to the usage of different authors in different ages. It can best be explained by a survey of the steps by which philosophy differentiated itself, in the history of Greek thought, from the idea of knowledge and culture in general. These steps may be traced in the gradual specification of the term. The earliest uses of the word (the verb occurs in Herodotus and Thucydides) imply the idea of the pursuit of knowledge ; but the distinction between the o-oct.OT, or wise man, and the c/AX6o-ocAos, or lover of wisdom, appears first in the Pla tonic writings, and lends itself naturally to the so-called Socratic irony. The same thought is to be found in Xenophon, and is doubtless to be attributed to the historical Socrates. But the word soon lost this special implication. What is of real interest to us is to trace the progress from the idea of the philosopher as occu pied with any and every department of knowledge to that which assigns him a special kind of knowledge as his province.
A specific sense of the word first meets us in Plato, who defines the philosopher as one who apprehends the essence or reality of things in opposition to the man who dwells in appearances and the shows of sense. The philosophers, he says, "are those who are able to grasp the eternal and immutable"; they are "those who set their affections on that which in each case really exists" (Rep. 48o). In Plato, however, this distinction is applied chiefly in an ethical and religious direction ; and, while it defines philoso phy, so far correctly, as the endeavour to express what things are in their ultimate constitution, it is not yet accompanied by a sufficient differentiation of the subsidiary inquiries by which this ultimate question may be approached. Logic, ethics and physics, psychology, theory of knowledge and ontology are all fused together by Plato in a semi-religious synthesis. It is not till we come to Aristotle that we find a demarcation of the different philosophic disciplines corresponding, in the main, to that still current. The earliest philosophers, or "physiologers," had occu pied themselves chiefly with what we may call cosmology ; the one question which covers everything for them is that of the under lying substance of the world around them, and they essay to answer this question, so to speak, by simple inspection. In Socra tes and Plato, on the other hand, the start is made from a con sideration of man's moral and intellectual activity ; but knowledge and action are confused with one another, as in the Socratic doc trine that virtue is knowledge. To this correspond the Platonic
confusion of logic and ethics and the attempt to substitute a theory of concepts for a metaphysic of reality. Aristotle's methodic intellect led him to separate the different aspects of reality here confounded. He became the founder of logic, psy chology, ethics and aesthetics as separate sciences; while he pre fixed to all such (comparatively) special inquiries the investiga tion of the ultimate nature of existence as such, or of those first principles which are common to, and presupposed in, every nar rower field of knowledge. For this investigation Aristotle's most usual name is "first philosophy" or, as a modern might say, "first principles"; but there has since been appropriated to it, appar ently by accident, the title "metaphysics." "Philosophy," as a term of general application, was not, indeed restricted by Aristotle or his successors to the disciplines just enumerated. Aristotle him self includes under the title, besides mathematics, all his physical inquiries. And "philosophy" was used in this wide sense (but often divided into "natural" and "moral" or "mental" philosophy) until comparatively recent times, although some of the special sciences had attained to independent cultivation already in the Alexandrian period. However, as the mass of knowledge accu mulated, it naturally came about that the name "philosophy" ceased to be applied to inquiries concerned with the particulars as such. The details of physics, for example, were abandoned to the scientific specialist, and philosophy restricted itself in this department to the question of the relation of the physical universe to the ultimate ground or author of things. This inquiry which was long called "rational cosmology," may be said to form part of the general subject of metaphysics, or at all events a pendant to it. By the gradual sifting out of the special sciences philosophy thus came to embrace primarily the inquiries grouped as "meta physics" or "first philosophy." These would embrace, according to the Woiffian scheme long current in philosophical textbooks, ontology proper, or the science of being as such, with its three branch sciences of (rational) psychology, cosmology and (rational or natural) theology, dealing with the three chief forms of being— the soul, the world and God. Subsidiary to metaphysics, as the central inquiry, stand the sciences of logic and ethics, to which may be added aesthetics, constituting three normative sciences— sciences, that is, which do not, primarily, describe facts, but rather prescribe ends or set forth ideals.