THE AWAKENING OF PHILOSOPHY 



pared to modern standards. Men, animals, and 

 plants, and their products, seemed to be the only 

 things of a passing nature, while all other things 

 seemed imperishable and eternal. 



At this stage, the three great world problems 

 could be answered only in a speculative way. 

 Positive facts bearing on them had not yet been 

 collected. And since man's thoughts were natu- 

 rally centered on himself, nothing was more log- 

 ical than that he should consider his temporal 

 abode, the earth, as the center of the universe 

 and himself as the center of all life. This earth 

 was to him a flat disc, bounded on the West by 

 the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar), 

 and later, with the extension of Phoenician com- 

 merce and the Roman empire, by the Atb.nlic 

 Ocean; in the East by the fabulous C~t':?.y 

 (India), which was supposed to extend no farther 

 than about the 75th degree of lonrrituc^ er^.t of 

 Greenwich ; on the North by the 55th 

 latitude; on the South by the Sahara c 

 What lay beyond these boundaries \va 

 heard of, except in fables and legends 

 primitive knowledge of the earth 

 responded the Ptolemaic 

 ceived toward the end c 

 Ptolemy of Alexandria. The heavens, according 



17 



