CHAPTER I 

 THE GREEKS 



There are three fundamental intellectual interests that mani- 

 fest themselves in divers forms at all times in the history of 

 philosophy. The first of these is man's knowledge of the uni- 

 verse in which he finds himself; the next is the nature of his 

 own experience; and the last is the problem of human conduct. 



It is not unnatural that among the Greeks, who were the first 

 European people to raise to consciousness the problems of ex- 

 perience, we find the genesis of these three fundamental aspects 

 of philosophical inquiry. Hence a brief sketch of the Greek 

 attitude to these typical phases of experience forms a natural 

 starting-point for a consideration of the later development of 

 the concept of method, and it has the additional advantage of 

 emphasising the aspects of genesis, interaction, and teleology 

 which are involved in all interpretations of experience. 



In the first place, the problems of the organisation and of 

 the interpretation of nature which exercised the ingenuity ot 

 Thales (b. circ. 620 B.C.), Anaximander (b. circ. 610 B.C.) 

 and Anaximenes (b. circ. 528 B. C.) were practically the same 

 problems for which Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Bacon 

 subsequently sought a new solution. In the second place, the 

 distinction between sensation and reason, how the senses and 

 the judgment are related to one another in the experience of 

 the individual, and how far knowledge of reality was possible, 

 are philosophical problems which have persisted from the time 

 of the Sophists, through Scholasticism, Descartes, Locke, 

 Hume, and Kant down to the present day. Finally , the ques- 

 tion as to what the ends of human conduct are, and as to how 

 far knowledge is capable of realising that standard, is the great 

 ethical problem for Socrates and Plato as it is for Kant and 

 modern .teleology. 



