PHILOSOPHY DEFINED. 131 



der Socrates, and still more under the Stoics, Philosophy be- 

 came little else than the doctrine of right living. Its sub- 

 ject-matter was practically cut down to the proper ruling of 

 conduct, public and private. Not indeed that the proper 

 ruling of conduct, as conceived by sundry of the later Greek 

 thinkers to constitute subject-matter of Philosophy, an- 

 swered to what was popularly understood by the proper rul- 

 ing of conduct. The injunctions of Zeno were not of the 

 same class as those which guided men from early times 

 downwards, in their daily observances, sacrifices, customs, 

 all having more or less of religious sanction ; but they were 

 principals of action enunciated without reference to times, 

 or persons, or special cases. What, then, was the con- 



stant element in these unlike ideas of Philosophy held by the 

 ancients? Clearly the character in which this last idea 

 agrees with the first, is that within its sphere of inquiry, Phi- 

 losophy seeks for wide and deep truths, as distinguished 

 from the multitudinous detailed truths which the surfaces 

 of things and actions present. 



By comparing the conceptions of Philosophy that have 

 been current in modern times, we get a like result. The 

 disciples of Schelling, Fichte, and their kindred, join the 

 Hegelian in ridiculing the so-called Philosophy which has 

 usurped the title in England. Not without reason, they 

 laugh on reading of "Philosophical instruments;" and 

 would deny that any one of the papers in the Philosophical 

 Transactions has the least claim to come under such a title. 

 Retaliating on their critics, the English may, and most of 

 them do, reject as absurd the imagined Philosophy of the 

 German schools. As consciousness cannot be transcended, 

 they hold that whether consciousness does or does not vouch 

 for the existence of something beyond itself, it at any rate 

 cannot comprehend that something; and that hence, in so 

 far as any Philosophy professes to be an Ontology, it is false. 

 These two views cancel one another over large parts of their 

 areas. The English criticism on the Germans, cuts off from 



