CHAPTER III. 

 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DEFINITION OF PHILOSOPHY. 



In Plato's Republic, 480 b, those men are called philosophers, 

 "who set their affections on that which, in each case, really exists", 

 and, in the same work, 484 a, philosophers are denned as those 

 who "are able to apprehend the eternal and immutable". But, in 

 the Theaetetus, 143 d, the term philosophy is used in a wider sense, 

 and there are included under it the special studies, which had, at 

 that time, become differentiated. It is significant that, in the writ- 

 ings of Aristotle, the dual use of the word philosophy persists. In 

 his Metaphysics, VI, 1, 1026 a, philosophy included mathematics, 

 physics, ethics and poetics, but there is another use of the word, 

 suggested in the same passage, to designate what he calls the science 

 of being as such. This latter science Aristotle often called o-cx/ua, 

 instead of <^tXoo-o0ta, but, generally, preferred to use in regard to 

 it the phrase irpurr] 0t\oo-o0ta. This he regarded as pre- 

 eminently the science of the philosopher. Subsequent writers 

 coined the word Metaphysics, which more or less by accident 

 became afterwards applied to this special task, and, for centuries 

 now, the word has been current. 



Now the dual conception of philosophy, held by Plato and by 

 Aristotle, clearly shows that the process of dividing the field of 

 knowledge into different compartments, had, to a very fair degree, 

 already been accomplished. It shows, furthermore, that these two 

 men held that there was yet a task to be done, even though the 

 special departments were carrying on to successful issue their inde- 

 pendent investigations. It might have been supposed that, in the 

 process of differentiation, all the necessary inquiry would be under- 

 taken by the differentiated parts. But such was not the case. 

 When there evolved, in the original complexity of man's primitive 

 experience, that attitude of mind we have called either science or 

 philosophy, because, as yet, the terms were synonymous, there 

 still were certain religious and practical interests, and, so, when 

 this new field became differentiated into special departments, there 



40 



