The Greeks 13 



These three phases of philosophical inquiry, then, exist in 

 more or less conscious form in Greek thought, suggest prob- 

 lems which are solved variously by different schools, and per- 

 sist throughout the whole course of the later development of 

 European thought. They reach definite organised expression 

 in Bacon, in Descartes, and in Kant, who may be taken as per- 

 haps the most significant types of, first, the scientific and cos- 

 mological investigations of the human mind into the materials 

 of experience; second, of the examination of experience itself, 

 with a view to ascertaining the relation of the sensory and of 

 the rational elements whose interaction makes up the course 

 of experience; and third, of the criticism of the processes and 

 standards of knowledge, with a view to the determination of the 

 ultimate validity of human experience. 



The aspects of the history of the concept of method which 

 call for immediate consideration are, therefore, (i) the manner 

 in which the Greeks interpreted the phenomena of nature and 

 formulated their scientific beliefs in a cosmology; (2) the way 

 in which they attempted to relate the phenomenon of sense, 

 experience, and the idea; and (3) the theory which they formu- 

 lated with regard to the function of knowledge as a guide to 

 conduct, and of philosophy as the way or method of the highest 

 human experience. 



The investigation of nature with a view to an organisation 

 and interpretation of its phenomena was first undertaken among 

 the Greeks by the Ionian school. As Aristotle afterwards said, 

 they found everything full of life — iravra TvXrjpri Oeutv. Their 

 main object of inquiry was genetic ; they were chiefly concerned 

 with the origin of things, and tried to reduce the multiplicity of 

 the phenomena of the universe to a single principle or simple 

 original substance, such as water, or vapor, or something un- 

 limited and infinite, endowed with life. Following the early 

 lonians, came the Pythagoreans (fl. 530 B.C.), with their in- 

 terest in mathematics, and reduced all things to number. They 

 had a higher conception of the nature of reality than their 

 predecessors, and in their abstract conception of quantity, and 

 of the harmony of opposites, which they applied in their ethics 

 as well as in their physics and cosmology, they emphasised the 

 function of philosophy as a guide to the moral consciousness 



