BY WILL DURANT, Ph.D. INSTRUCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY, EXTENSION TEACHING COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1917 All rights reserved Copyright, 1917, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. —— Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1917. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.   TO ALDEN FREEMAN...

T HE purpose of this essay is to show: first, that the social problem has been the basic concern of many of the greater philosophers; second, that an approach to the social problem through philosophy is the first condition of even a moderately successful treatment of this problem; and third, that an approach to philosophy through the social problem is indispensable to the revitalization of philosophy. By “philosophy” we shall understand a study of experience as a whole, or of a portion of experi

H ISTORY is a process of rebarbarization. A people made vigorous by arduous physical conditions of life, and driven by the increasing exigencies of survival, leaves its native habitat, moves down upon a less vigorous people, conquers, displaces, or absorbs it. Habits of resolution and activity developed in a less merciful environment now rapidly produce an economic surplus; and part of the resources so accumulated serve as capital in a campaign of imperialist conquest. The growing surplus genera

W HY do we love Plato? Perhaps because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades, lover of the sweet intoxication of dialectical revelry, full of passion for the elusive reality behind thoughts and things. We love him for his unstinted energy, for the wildly nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its unredeemed and adventurous complexity. We love him because he was alive every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be loved even for the erro

“As I read Plato,” writes Professor Dewey, “philosophy began with some sense of its essentially political basis and mission—a recognition that its problems were those of the organization of a just social order. But it soon got lost in dreams of another world.” [48] Plato and Aristotle are the crura cerebri of Europe. But in Aristotle, along with a wealth of acute observation of men and institutions, we find a diminishing interest in reconstruction; the Stagirite spent too much of his time in car

P ASSING from Bacon to Spinoza we meet with Thomas Hobbes, a man from whom Spinoza drew many of his ideas, though very little of his inspiration. The social incidence of the greater part of Hobbes’s thinking has long been recognized; he is not a figure over whom the biographer of social thought finds much cause to quarrel. He is at once the materialist par excellence of modern philosophy, and the most uncompromising protagonist of the absolutist theory of the state. The individual, all compact o

L ET us dare to compress within a page or two the social aspect of philosophical thought from Spinoza to Nietzsche. Without forgetting that our purpose is to show the social problem as the dominant interest of only many , not all, of the greater philosophers, we may yet risk the assertion that the majority of the men who formed the epistemological tradition from Descartes to Kant were at heart concerned less with the problem of knowledge than with that of social relations. Descartes slips throug

A ND so we come through our five episodes in the history of the reconstructive mind, and find ourselves in the bewildering present, comfortably seated, let us say, in the great reading room of our Columbia Library. An attendant liberates us from the maze of “Nietzsche’s Works” lying about us, and returns presently with a stack of thirty books purporting to give the latest developments in the field of social study and research. We are soon lost in their graphs and statistics, their records and re

N OW there are a great many people who will feel no thrill at all at the mention of philosophy,—who will rather consider themselves excused by the very occurrence of the word from continuing on the road which this discussion proposes to travel. No man dares to talk of philosophy in these busy days except after an apologetic preface; philosophers themselves have come to feel that their thinking is so remote from practical endeavor that they have for the most part abandoned the effort to relate th

I NTELLIGENCE is organized experience; but intelligence itself must be organized. Consider the resources of the unused intelligence of the world; intelligence potential but undeveloped; intelligence developed but isolated; intelligence allowed to waste itself in purely personal pursuits, unasked to enter into coöperation for larger ends. Consider the Platos fretting in exile while petty politicians rule the world; consider Montaigne, and Hobbes, and Hume, and Carlyle, and the thousand other men

A ND now we stop for objections. “This plan is a hare-brained scheme for a new priesthood and a new aristocracy. It would put a group of college professors and graduates into a position where they could do almost as they please. You think you avoid this by telling the gentlemen that they must limit themselves to the statement of fact; but if you knew the arts of journalism you would not make so naïve a distinction between airing opinions and stating facts. When a man buys up a newspaper what he

S EE now, in summary, how modest a suggestion it is, grandiloquent though it may have seemed. We propose no ’ism , we make no programme; we suggest, tentatively, a method. We propose a new start, a new tack, a new approach,—not to the exclusion of other approaches, but to their assistance. If this thing should be done, it would not mean that other gropers toward a better world would have to stand idle; it would but give light to them that walk in darkness. And it would make possible a more gener