METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM 



And so I am a sceptic still. It was not by any means a useless task 

 to distinguish with all possible exactness the forms of experience from 

 one another. But the conclusion now is, not as before, that a man 

 should exercise his soul (in Aristotle's phrase) in conformity with 

 virtue, without the hope of unifying in any way the products of its 

 exercises.^ It is, to view the world as a whole and the place and course 

 of man and of humanity in it, and to know "what he must do while 

 still in his compounded body." The consideration of man and his 

 experiences as an individual led in the end to contemplation; the 

 consideration of social man and his experiences leads to action. No 

 more shall we take Gautama and Plato for our guide, but rather those 

 determined men who from Confucius to Marx were vehicles of the 

 evolutionary process, working through them to implement the 

 Promise occluded in the very beginning of our world. 



^ When writing this introductory essay, I happened to be reading that great work 

 of scholarship, George Thomson's Aeschylus and Athens (London, 1941), in which he 

 describes the anthropological origins of Greek civilisation and folk-lore, and the rise 

 of Greek literature and culture from them. From a discussion of Ionian science, especially 

 in Anaximander (p. 83), and Orphic mystical theology (p. 156), he suggests that "the 

 tendency of aristocratic thought is to divide, to keep things apart" while "the tendency 

 of popular thought is to unite." In Orphism, Love implied the reunion of what had 

 been sundered. It would be interesting to investigate the social significance of philo- 

 sophical "dividers" and "uniters" in different historical times; certainly in my own 

 development, Thomson's correlation has been strikingly substantiated. I was unable 

 to find any unified world-view until I took man's social life into account, a thing no 

 aristocratic thinker would ever desire to do, unless as a reaction against democratic 

 thinkers for specifically polemical purposes. 



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