CHAP, vin CONCEPTUAL RECONSTRUCTION 123 



further, the beginnings of genuine science. We have 

 Egyptian text-books of arithmetic, and the elaborate 

 astronomical records of Babylonia, while the practical 

 requirements of land measurement laid the foundations of 

 an empirical geometry. But with the early Greek philo- 

 sophers a new epoch opens. 1 The Ionic philosophers 

 conceived the ideal of interrogating Nature without 

 regard to tradition or to the requirements of the religious 

 consciousness in the simple belief that they might find out 

 her secret by reasoning from common observation. They 

 attacked the problem of reality with simple-minded confi- 

 dence. Modern research goes to show that their theories 

 of the nature of things were crude but intelligible general- 

 isations of experience as they interpreted it : on the 

 question what reality is they agreed that it was something 

 different from reality as it appears, yet whether they took 

 Water, Air, Fire or the Flux of things as the ultimate 

 reality, they founded themselves at bottom on facts of 

 experience which they took to be fundamental and extended 

 by simple and uncritical generalisation. But with the rise 

 of the Eleatic school a new method appears. Reality 

 according to the Eleatics must be one, not clearly because 

 in experience we find that all things are one, but because 

 the conception of Unity satisfies certain intellectual needs. 

 Reality in general from this time forward becomes subject 

 to the character and relations of the concepts by which we 

 can interpret it, and there arises accordingly a systematic 

 effort to construct reality by means of an examination of 

 thought and its products. But the thought-product itself 

 required criticism, and to supply a regular method of 

 criticism was the work of Socrates. The Socratic dialectic 

 aimed in the first place at the accurate definition of mean- 

 ings, and proceeded by two methods which might be used 

 separately or in combination. On the one hand, a concept 

 might be examined by relation to the experience which it 

 appeared to formulate. This was the foundation of a 

 scientific induction. On .the other hand, it might be tested 

 and defined by comparison with other concepts. It would 



1 At least in Europe. I will not here enquire how far the conditions 

 mentioned below are satisfied by Hindoo thought as well. 



