The Biographical History Of Philosophy From Its Origin In Greece Down To The Present Day Volume 1 PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1857 edition. Excerpt: ... many, these unfortunate attempts will create a prejudice against what is truly grand in his philosophic career. In the Cours de Philosophic Positive we have the grandest, because on the whole the truest, system which Philosophy has yet produced; nor should any differences, which must inevitably arise on points of detail, make us forget the greatness of the achievement and the debt we owe to the lonely thinker who wrought out this system. CONCLUSION. Modern Philosophy opens with a Method; and ends with a Method; and in each case this method leads to positive Science, and sets Metaphysics aside. Within these limits we have witnessed various efforts to solve the problems of Philosophy; and all those efforts have ended in skepticism. There are two characteristics of Modern Philosophy which may here be briefly touched on. The first is the progressive development of Science, which in ancient speculations occupied the subordinate rank, and which now occupies the highest. The second is the reproduction in Philosophy of all the questions which agitated the Greeks, which also pass through a similar course of development: not only are the questions similar, but their evolutions are so. After the Eleatics had vexed the problems of Existence to no purpose, there came Democritus, Anaxagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, who endeavored to settle the problems of the nature and origin of human knowledge. So, in modern times, after Descartes and Spinoza, came Hobbes, Locke, Leibnitz, Reid, and Kant. The ancient researches into the origin of knowledge ended in the Skeptics, the Stoics, and the New Academy: that is to say, in Skepticism, Common Sense, and Skepticism again. The modern researches ended in Berkeley, Hume, Reid, and Kant: that is, in Idealism, ..