A History of Philosophy

"Wise I may not call them; for that is a great name which belongs to God alone; lovers of wisdom or philosophers is their modest and befitting title." So speaks Socrates in Plato's Phædrus of the genuine teachers of mankind, who, whether they be poets or lawgivers or dialecticians like Socrates himself, know what they are talking about, and can distinguish what is really good from what is only apparently so, preferring what can be shown to be true to what is merely plausible and attractive. The word Philosophy has in the course of its long history been used now in a wider, now in a narrower sense; but it has constantly stood for inquiry not so much after certain particular facts as after the fundamental character of this world in which we find ourselves, and of the kind of life which in such a world it behoves us to live. Sometimes a distinction has been drawn between natural and moral philosophy, according as attention is directed to the world, or to our life in it. In English books of a hundred years ago "philosopher" more often than not meant a "natural philosopher," and "philosophy" what we should nowadays call "natural science."