Publisher's Synopsis
From the PREFACE.
It is somewhat anomalous that when the study of Philosophy is generally supposed to begin with its history, there is no book in the latter department that does not demand a previous knowledge of the subject. Hence a person who may desire to possess some acquaintance with the science of mind finds himself, at the outset, gravitating between the horns of an unpleasant dilemma-he can understand little of modern philosophical works without some insight into the previous course of speculation, and the histories from which he should learn it are enveloped in a mist of technical terminology, which presupposes knowledge only to be gained from the treatises of original thinkers-thus, philosophical text-books are unintelligible without a history, and the history is inaccessible without the terminology of the text-books!
The following pages constitute a humble endeavour to aid anyone who finds himself in such an unpleasant position, and in the future I hope to provide a companion volume upon Modern Philosophy; in fact, the portion yet unprinted seems to me to be most needed, and I have already covered some of the ground, but difficulties of treatment have delayed the completion of the work, and in the meantime I venture to publish the present instalment.
As most of the works that deal with this subject have for many years been translations of German text-books, I may be pardoned a few words of introduction to one of less importance that has been reared at home. German thought is academic, while ours is more human, and, therefore, I have endeavoured to show Philosophers not as mere thinking machines, but as men struggling with the problems of the world, and as human beings who played their part in some of the stirring scenes of the earlier spiritual movements of civilization.
Secondly, being at liberty to determine my own mode of treatment, I have, in most cases, clearly indicated any word that has acquired a philosophical signification, either by a capital letter, inverted commas, or italics.
With regard to Greek terms I have had some difficulty. Many are of such importance that an explanation seems necessary, but to have done so in every case would have involved an appearance of pedantry extremely disheartening to the general reader. Hence I have availed myself of the original terms only when I felt my own translation may have needed some explanation, but others of importance have been noted in the 'Index of Terms' at the end of the book.
Lastly, I have endeavoured to supply the deficiencies of my exposition by a series of diagrams which group together symbolically many of the abstract principles. This method has been used with advantage in most other sciences dealing with concepts of a like nature, and it has been long established in Logic, but its introduction to Philosophy proper seems to have been hitherto unattempted.
