THE AWAKENING OF PHILOSOPHY 



with their simple blood relationships were under- 

 mined by these economic changes, when local 

 division and property distinctions appeared in the 

 place of the fraternal relations of the former 

 members of a tribe, when the means of life be- 

 came abundant and a class of leisure freemen 

 thrived on the shoulders of a working population 

 composed of slaves, then the study of world 

 problems entered a new stage. The evolution of 

 the tools profoundly influenced the evolution of 

 man's ideas, in those primordial days as well as 

 ever after. 



We then find growing up, simultaneously with 

 the gradual disintegration of the old faiths, 

 schools of thinkers who base their ideas on a 

 closer observation of tangible facts. The correct- 

 ness of the current conception of the world is 

 then doubted. With the growing tendency to 

 solve the riddles of the universe by inductive 

 methods and experienced facts, there also de- 

 velops a critique of human relationships, a prob- 

 ing into the meaning of right and wrong, good 

 and bad. When polytheism becomes pantheism, 

 materialism meets idealism on the field of 

 thought. And this growing materialism is but 

 the first faint reflex of a class struggle in ancient 

 society. And all philosophies of the world, no 



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