THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY 



with in the past, excepting those only in which 

 the necessary limitations of human thinking have 

 been expressly or tacitly ignored. Far from de- 

 throning philosophy, we are assigning to it a 

 scope as wide as was recognized for it by the 

 early Greeks; while in approaching its prob- 

 lems, we are enabled to profit by that physical 

 investigation which Sokrates not unjustly stig- 

 matized, in his own day, as hopelessly mislead- 

 ing, but which now, conducted upon sounder 

 methods, is our surest guide to the knowledge 

 of truth. 



Thus is philosophy vindicated, and its func- 

 tion is seen to be as important as that of science. 

 Rejecting, as we were compelled to do, the 

 metaphysical assumption that philosophy is a 

 kind of knowledge generically distinct from all 

 other kinds, and asserting for it a common root 

 with science and with ordinary knowledge, we 

 have nevertheless seen that it differs from the 

 two latter, much in the same way that the one 

 of them differs from the other. Accurate quan- 

 titative prevision is, in the nature of things, 

 confined to the most special of the special in- 

 quiries with which science is concerned. Lim- 

 ited as it is to individual cases occurring under 

 general laws, it must be left on one side in 

 enumerating the distinctive features of philoso- 

 phy. But from what has been brought forward, 

 it at once appears that philosophy differs from 



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