ABSTRACT
So much for the popular use. Turning to the more technical meaning, we have only a further and more exact application of the same idea. Philosophy is the attempt to look not merely at bits of life, but at life as a whole in the light of the principles that are involved in it and are capable of giving unity to it. First it
breaking up under the impact of a wider civilization. Such another was t he age of the Renaissance, when the old things in religi on, politics, art, and science were passing away and all things were becoming new. Still another was the age of the French Revolution, when the Encyclop~dists were raising new questions as to the reality of progress, the relation of body to mind, of the Deity to His Universe, of human rights to the established order of society. Such finally is our own age; for ours is a time in which just these questions are being pressed upon us as never before. In all these periods we have had great questions asked and great philosophers have arisen to give world-famous answers to them: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza; Kant, Fichte, Hegel. If in our own time individual names do not stand out with the same clearness, it is partly because there are so many of them, partly because we are as yet so near to them that we cannot see them in their proper perspective.
