Initiation into Philosophy by Emile Faguet

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INITIATION INTO PHILOSOPHY

by Emile Faguet of the French Academy

Author of "The Cult Of Incompetence,"
"Initiation Into Literature," etc.

Translated from the French by
Sir Homer Gordon, Bart.

1914

PREFACE

This volume, as indicated by the title, is designed to show the way to the
beginner, to satisfy and more especially to excite his initial
curiosity. It affords an adequate idea of the march of facts and of
ideas. The reader is led, somewhat rapidly, from the remote origins to the
most recent efforts of the human mind.

It should be a convenient repertory to which the mind may revert in order
to see broadly the general opinion of an epoch--and what connected it with
those that followed or preceded it. It aims above all at being _a
frame_ in which can conveniently be inscribed, in the course of further
studies, new conceptions more detailed and more thoroughly examined.

It will have fulfilled its design should it incite to research and
meditation, and if it prepares for them correctly.

E. FAGUET.

CONTENTS

PART I
ANTIQUITY

CHAPTER I
BEFORE SOCRATES

Philosophical Interpreters of the Universe,
of the Creation and Constitution of the World.

CHAPTER II
THE SOPHISTS

Logicians and Professors of Logic,
and of the Analysis of Ideas, and of Discussion.

CHAPTER III
SOCRATES

Philosophy Entirely Reduced to Morality, and Morality
Considered as the End of all Intellectual Activity.

CHAPTER IV
PLATO

Plato, like Socrates, is Pre-eminently a Moralist, but
he Reverts to General Consideration of the Universe,
and Deals with Politics and Legislation.

CHAPTER V
ARISTOTLE

A Man of Encyclopaedic Learning; as Philosopher,
more especially Moralist and Logician.

CHAPTER VI
VARIOUS SCHOOLS

The Development in Various Schools of the General
Ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

CHAPTER VII
EPICUREANISM

Epicureanism Believes that the Duty of Man is to
seek Happiness, and that Happiness Consists in Wisdom.

CHAPTER VIII
STOICISM

The Passions are Diseases which can and must be Extirpated.

CHAPTER IX
ECLECTICS AND SCEPTICS

Philosophers who Wished to Belong to No School.
Philosophers who Decried All Schools and All Doctrines.

CHAPTER X
NEOPLATONISM

Reversion to Metaphysics. Imaginative Metaphysicians
after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess.

CHAPTER XI
CHRISTIANITY

Philosophic Ideas which Christianity Welcomed, Adopted, or Created;
How it must Give a Fresh Aspect to All Philosophy,
even that Foreign to Itself.

PART II
IN THE MIDDLE AGES

CHAPTER I
FROM THE FIFTH CENTURY TO THE THIRTEENTH

Philosophy is only an Interpreter of Dogma. When it is Declared Contrary to
Dogma by the Authority of Religion, it is a Heresy. Orthodox and Heterodox
Interpretations. Some Independent Philosophers.

CHAPTER II
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Influence of Aristotle. His Adoption by the Church.
Religious Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

CHAPTER III
THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES

Decadence of Scholasticism. Forebodings of the Coming Era.
Great Moralists. The Kabbala. Sorcery.

CHAPTER IV
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

It Is Fairly Accurate to Consider that from the Point of View
of Philosophy, the Middle Ages Lasted until Descartes.
Free-thinkers More or Less Disguised.
Partisans of Reason Apart from Faith, of Observation, and of Experiment.

PART III
MODERN TIMES

CHAPTER I
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Descartes. Cartesianism.

CHAPTER II
CARTESIANS

All the Seventeenth Century was under the Influence of Descartes.
Port-Royal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz.

CHAPTER III
THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality,
General Politics, and Religious Politics.

CHAPTER IV
THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY

Berkeley: A Highly Idealist Philosophy
which Regarded Matter as Non-existent.
David Hume: Sceptical Philosophy.
The Scottish School: Philosophy of Common Sense.

CHAPTER V
THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY

Voltaire a Disciple of Locke.
Rousseau a Free-thinking Christian, but deeply Imbued
with Religious Sentiments.
Diderot a Capricious Materialist.
D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed Materialists.
Condillac a Philosopher of Sensations.

CHAPTER VI
KANT

Kant Reconstructed all Philosophy by Supporting it on Morality.

CHAPTER VII
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GERMANY

The Great Reconstructors of the World,
Analogous to the First Philosophers of Antiquity.
Great General Systems, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.

CHAPTER VIII
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND

The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism:
Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer.

CHAPTER IX
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE

The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin.
The Positivist School: Auguste Comte.
The Kantist School: Renouvier.
Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan.

INDEX

INITIATION INTO PHILOSOPHY

PART I

ANTIQUITY

CHAPTER I

BEFORE SOCRATES

Philosophical Interpreters of the Universe, of the Creation
and Constitution of the World.

PHILOSOPHY.--The aim of philosophy is to seek the explanation of all
things: the quest is for the first _causes_ of everything, and also
_how_ all things are, and finally _why_, with what design, with a
view to what, things are. That is why, taking "principle" in all the senses
of the word, it has been called the science of first principles.

Philosophy has always existed. Religions--all religions--are
philosophies. They are indeed the most complete. But, apart from religions,
men have sought the causes and principles of everything and endeavoured to
acquire general ideas. These researches apart from religious dogmas in
pagan antiquity are the only ones with which we are here to be concerned.

THE IONIAN SCHOOL: THALES.--The Ionian School is the most ancient
school of philosophy known. It dates back to the seventh century before
Christ. Thales of Miletus, a natural philosopher and astronomer, as we
should describe him, believed matter--namely, that of which all things and
all beings are made--to be in perpetual transformation, and that these
transformations are produced by powerful beings attached to every portion
of matter. These powerful beings were gods. Everything, therefore, was full
of gods. His philosophy was a mythology. He also thought that the
essential element of matter was water, and that it was water, under the
influence of the gods, which transformed itself into earth, air, and fire,
whilst from water, earth, air, and fire came everything that is in nature.

ANAXIMANDER; HERACLITUS.--Anaximander of Miletus, an astronomer
also, and a geographer, believed that the principle of all things is
_indeterminate_--a kind of chaos wherein nothing has form or shape;
that from chaos come things and beings, and that they return thither in
order to emerge again. One of his particular theories was that fish were
the most ancient of animals, and that all animals had issued from them
through successive transformations. This theory was revived for a while
about fifty years ago.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (very obscure, and with this epithet attached
permanently to his name) saw all things as a perpetual growth--in an
indefinite state of becoming. Nothing is; all things grow and are destined
to eternal growth. Behind them, nevertheless, there is an eternal master
who does not change. It is our duty to resemble him as much as we can; that
is to say, as much as an ape can resemble a man. Calmness is imperative: to
be as motionless as transient beings can. The popular legend runs that
Heraclitus "always wept"; what is known of him only tends to prove that he
was grave, and did not favour emotionalism.

ANAXAGORAS; EMPEDOCLES.--Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, above all else a
natural philosopher, settled at Athens about 470 B.C.; was the master and
friend of Pericles; was on the point of being put to death, as Socrates was
later on, for the crime of indifference towards the religion of the
Athenians, and had to take refuge at Lampsacus, where he died. Like
Anaximander, he believed that everything emerged from something
indeterminate and confused; but he added that what caused the emergence
from that state was the organizing intelligence, the Mind, just as in man,
it is the intelligence which draws thought from cerebral undulations, and
forms a clear idea out of a confused idea. Anaxagoras exerted an almost
incomparable influence over Greek philosophy of the classical times.

Empedocles of Agrigentum, a sort of magician and high-priest, almost a
deity, whose life and death are but little known, appears to have possessed
an encyclopaedic brain. From him is derived the doctrine of the four
elements, for whereas the philosophers who preceded him gave as the sole
source of things--some water, others air, others fire, others the earth, he
regarded them all four equally as the primal elements of everything. He
believed that the world is swayed by two contrary forces--love and hate,
the one desiring eternally to unite, the other eternally to
disintegrate. Amid this struggle goes on a movement of organization,
incessantly retarded by hate, perpetually facilitated by love; and from
this movement have issued--first, vegetation, then the lower animals, then
the higher animals, then men. In Empedocles can be found either evident
traces of the religion of Zoroaster of Persia (the perpetual antagonism of
two great gods, that of good and that of evil), or else a curious
coincidence with this doctrine, which will appear again later among the
Manicheans.

PYTHAGORAS.--Pythagoras appears to have been born about B.C. 500 on
the Isle of Elea, to have travelled much, and to have finally settled in
Greater Greece (southern Italy). Pythagoras, like Empedocles, was a sort
of magician or god. His doctrine was a religion, the respect with which he
was surrounded was a cult, the observances he imposed on his family and on
his disciples were rites. What he taught was that the true realities, which
do not change, were numbers. The fundamental and supreme reality is
_one_; the being who is one is God; from this number, which is one,
are derived all the other numbers which are the foundation of beings, their
inward cause, their essence; we are all more or less perfect numbers; each
created thing is a more or less perfect number. The world, governed thus by
combinations of numbers, has always existed and will always exist. It
develops itself, however, according to a numerical series of which we do
not possess the key, but which we can guess. As for human destiny it is
this: we have been animated beings, human or animal; according as we have
lived well or ill we shall be reincarnated either as superior men or as
animals more or less inferior. This is the doctrine of _metempsychosis_,
which had many adherents in ancient days, and also in a more or less
fanciful fashion in modern times.

To Pythagoras have been attributed a certain number of maxims which are
called the _Golden Verses_.

XENOPHANES; PARMENIDES.--Xenophanes of Colophon is also a
"unitarian." He accepts only one God, and of all the ancient philosophers
appears to be the most opposed to mythology, to belief in a multiplicity of
gods resembling men, a doctrine which he despises as being immoral. There
is one God, eternal, immutable, immovable, who has no need to transfer
Himself from one locality to another, who is _without place_, and who
governs all things by His thought alone.

Advancing further, Parmenides told himself that if He alone really exists
who is one and eternal and unchangeable, all else is not only inferior to
Him, but is only a _semblance_, and that mankind, earth, sky, plants,
and animals are only a vast illusion--phantoms, a mirage, which would
disappear, which would no longer exist, and _would never have existed_
if we could perceive the Self-existent.

ZENO; DEMOCRITUS.--Zeno of Elea, who must be mentioned more
especially because he was the master of that Gorgias of whom Socrates was
the adversary, was pre-eminently a subtle dialectician in whom the sophist
already made his appearance, and who embarrassed the Athenians by captious
arguments, at the bottom of which always could be found this fundamental
principle: apart from the Eternal Being all is only semblance; apart from
Him who is all, all is nothing.

Democritus of Abdera, disciple of Leucippus of Abdera (about whom nothing
is known), is the inventor of the theory of atoms. Matter is composed of an
infinite number of tiny indivisible bodies which are called atoms; these
atoms from all eternity, or at least since the commencement of matter, have
been endued with certain movements by which they attach themselves to one
another, and agglomerate or separate, and thence is caused the formation of
all things, and the destruction, which is only the disintegration, of all
things. The soul itself is only an aggregation of specially tenuous and
subtle atoms. It is probable that when a certain number of these atoms quit
the body, sleep ensues; that when nearly all depart, it causes the
appearance of death (lethargy, catalepsy); that when they all depart, death
occurs. We are brought into relation with the external world by the advent
in us of extremely subtle atoms--reflections of things, semblances of
things--which enter and mingle with the constituent atoms of our
souls. There is nothing in our intelligence which has not been brought
there by our senses, and our intelligence is only the combination of the
atoms composing our souls with the atoms that external matter sends, so to
speak, into our souls. The doctrines of Democritus will be found again in
those of Epicurus and Lucretius.

CHAPTER II

THE SOPHISTS

Logicians and Professors of Logic, and of the Analysis of
Ideas, and of Discussion.

DOCTRINES OF THE SOPHISTS.--The Sophists descend from Parmenides and
Zeno of Elea; Gorgias was the disciple of the latter. By dint of thinking
that all is semblance save the Supreme Being, who alone is real, it is very
easy to arrive at belief in all being semblance, including that Being; or
at least what is almost tantamount, that all is semblance, inclusive of any
idea we can possibly conceive of the Supreme Being. To believe nothing, and
to demonstrate that there is no reason to believe in anything, is the
cardinal principle of all the Sophists. Then, it may be suggested, there is
nothing for it but to be silent. No, there is the cultivation of one's
mind (the only thing of the existence of which we are sure), so as to give
it ability, readiness, and strength. With what object? To become a
dexterous thinker, which in itself is a fine thing; to be also a man of
consideration, listened to in one's city, and to arrive at its government.

The Sophists accordingly gave lessons, especially in psychology,
dialectics, and eloquence. They further taught philosophy, but in order to
demonstrate that all philosophy is false; and, as Pascal observed later,
that to ridicule philosophy is truly philosophical. They seem to have been
extremely intellectual, very learned, and most serious despite their
scepticism, and to have rendered Greece the very great service of making a
penetrating analysis--the first recorded--of our faculty of knowledge and
of the limitations, real, possible, or probable, of that faculty.

PROTAGORAS; GORGIAS; PRODICUS.--They were very numerous, the taste
for their art, which might be called philosophical criticism, being
widespread in Attica. It may be believed, as Plato maintains, that some
were of very mediocre capacity, and this is natural; but there were also
some who clearly were eminent authorities. The most illustrious were
Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus of Ceos. Protagoras seems to have been
the most philosophical of them all, Gorgias the best orator and the chief
professor of rhetoric, Prodicus the most eminent moralist and poet.
Protagoras rejected all metaphysics--that is, all investigation of first
causes and of the universe--and reduced all philosophy to the science of
self-control with a view to happiness, and control of others with a view to
their happiness. Like Anaxagoras, he was banished from the city under the
charge of impiety, and his books were publicly burnt.

Gorgias appears to have maintained the same ideas with more moderation and
also with less profundity. He claimed, above all, to be able to make a good
orator. According to Plato, it was he whom Socrates most persistently made
the butt of his sarcasms.

Prodicus, whom Plato himself esteemed, appears to have been principally
preoccupied with the moral problem. He was the author of the famous
apologue which represented Hercules having to choose between two paths, the
one being that of virtue, the other of pleasure. Like Socrates later on, he
too was subject to the terrible accusation of impiety, and underwent
capital punishment. The Sophists furnish the most important epoch in the
history of ancient philosophy; until their advent the philosophic systems
were great poems on the total of all things, known and unknown. The
Sophists opposed these ambitious and precipitate generalizations, in which
imagination had the larger share, and their discovery was to bring
philosophy back to its true starting point by affirming that the first
thing to do, and that before all else, was to know our own mind and its
mechanism. Their error possibly was, while saying that it was the first
thing to do, too often to affirm that it was the only thing to do; still
the fact remains that they were perfectly accurate in their assurance that
it was primary.

CHAPTER III

SOCRATES

Philosophy Entirely Reduced to Morality, and Morality
Considered as the End of all Intellectual Activity.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCRATES.--Of Socrates nothing is known except
that he was born at Athens, that he held many public discussions with all
and sundry in the streets of Athens, and that he died under the Thirty
Tyrants. Of his ideas we know nothing, because he wrote nothing, and
because his disciples were far too intelligent; in consequence of which it
is impossible to know if what they said was thought by him, had really been
his ideas or theirs. What seems certain is that neither Aristophanes nor
the judges at the trial of Socrates were completely deceived in considering
him a Sophist; for he proceeded from them. It is true he proceeded from
them by reaction, because evidently their universal scepticism had
terrified him; but nevertheless he was their direct outcome, for like them
he was extremely mistrustful of the old vast systems of philosophy, and to
those men who pretended to know everything he opposed a phrase which is
probably authentic: "I know that I know nothing;" for, like the Sophists,
he wished to recall philosophy to earth from heaven, namely from
metaphysics to the study of man, and nothing else; for, like the Sophists,
he confined and limited the field with a kind of severe and imperious
modesty which was none the less contemptuous of the audacious; for,
finally, like the Sophists, but in this highly analogous to many
philosophers preceding the Sophists, he had but a very moderate and
mitigated respect for the religion of his fellow-citizens.

According to what we know of Socrates from Xenophon, unquestionably the
least imaginative of his disciples, Socrates, like the Sophists, reduced
philosophy to the study of man; but his great and incomparable originality
lay in the fact that whereas the Sophists wished man to study himself in
order to be happy, Socrates wished him to study himself in order to be
moral, honest, and just, without any regard to happiness. For Socrates,
everything had to tend towards morality, to contribute to it, and to be
subordinated to it as the goal and as the final aim. He applied himself
unceasingly, relates Xenophon, to examine and to determine what is good and
evil, just and unjust, wise and foolish, brave and cowardly, etc. He
incessantly applied himself, relates Aristotle--and therein he was as much
a true professor of rhetoric as of morality--thoroughly to define and
carefully to specify the meaning of words in order not to be put off with
vague terms which are illusions of thought, and in order to discipline his
mind rigorously so as to make it an organ for the ascertainment of truth.

HIS METHOD.--He had dialectical methods, "the art of conferring," as
Montaigne called it, more or less happy, which he had probably borrowed
from the Sophists, that contributed to cause him to be considered one of
them, and exercised a wide vogue long after him. He "delivered men's
minds," as he himself said--that is, he believed, or affected to believe,
that the verities are in a latent state in all minds, and that it needed
only patience, dexterity, and skillful investigation to bring them to
light. Elsewhere, he _interrogated_ in a captious fashion in order to
set the interlocutor in contradiction to himself and to make him confess
that he had said what he had not thought he had said, agreed to what he had
not believed he had agreed to; and he triumphed maliciously over such
confusions. In short, he seems to have been a witty and teasing Franklin,
and to have taught true wisdom by laughing at everyone. Folk never like to
be ridiculed, and no doubt the recollection of these ironies had much to do
with the iniquitous judgment which condemned him, and which he seems to
have challenged up to the last.

HIS INFLUENCE.--His influence was infinite. It is from him that
morality became the end itself, the last and supreme end of all
philosophy--the reason of philosophy; and, as was observed by Nietzsche,
the Circe of philosophers, who enchants them, who dictates to them
beforehand, or who modifies their systems in advance by terrifying them as
to what their systems may contain irreverent towards itself or dangerous in
relation to it. From Socrates to Kant and thence onward, morality has been
the Circe of philosophers, and morality is, as it were, the spiritual
daughter of Socrates. On the other hand, his influence was terrible for the
religion of antiquity because it directed the mind towards the idea that
morality is the sole object worthy of knowledge, and that the ancient
religions were immoral, or of such a dubious morality as to deserve the
desertion and scorn of honest men. Christianity fought paganism with the
arguments of the disciples of Socrates--with Socratic arguments; modern
philosophies and creeds are all impregnated with Socraticism. When it was
observed that the Sophists form the most important epoch in the history of
ancient philosophy, it was because they taught Socrates to seek a
philosophy which was entirely human and preoccupied solely with the
happiness of man. This led a great mind, and in his track other very great
minds, to direct all philosophy, and even all human science, towards the
investigation of goodness, goodness being regarded as the condition of
happiness.

CHAPTER IV

PLATO

Plato, like Socrates, is Pre-eminently a Moralist,
but he reverts to General Consideration of the Universe
and Deals with Politics and Legislation.

PLATO A DISCIPLE OF SOCRATES.--Plato, like Xenophon, was a pupil of
Socrates, but Xenophon only wanted to be the clerk of Socrates; and Plato,
as an enthusiastic disciple, was at the same time very faithful and very
unfaithful to Socrates. He was a faithful disciple to Socrates in never
failing to place morality in the foremost rank of all philosophical
considerations; in that he never varied. He was an unfaithful disciple to
Socrates in that, imaginative and an admirable poet, he bore back
philosophy from earth to heaven; he did not forbid himself--quite the
contrary--to pile up great systems about all things and to envelop the
universe in his vast and daring conceptions. He invincibly established
morality, the science of virtue, as the final goal of human knowledge, in
his brilliant and charming _Socratic Dialogues_; he formed great
systems in all the works in which he introduces himself as speaking in his
own name. He was very learned, and acquainted with everything that had been
written by all the philosophers before Socrates, particularly Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras. He reconsidered all their teaching,
and he himself brought to consideration a force and a wealth of mind such
as appear to have had no parallel in the world.

THE "IDEAS."--Seeking, in his turn, what are the first causes of all
and what is eternally real behind the simulations of this transient world,
he believed in a single God, as had many before him; but in the bosom of
this God, so to speak, he placed, he seemed to see, _Ideas_--that is
to say, eternal types of all things which in this world are variable,
transient, and perishable. What he effected by such novel, original, and
powerful imagination is clear. He replaced the Olympus of the populace by a
spiritual Olympus; the material mythology by an idealistic mythology;
polytheism by polyideism, if it may be so expressed--the gods by
types. Behind every phenomenon, stream, forest, mountain, the Greeks
perceived a deity, a material being like themselves, more powerful than
themselves. Behind every phenomenon, behind every thought as well, every
feeling, every institution--behind _everything, no matter what it be_,
Plato perceived an idea, immortal, eternal, indestructible, and
incorruptible, which existed in the bosom of the Eternal, and of which all
that comes under our observation is only the vacillating and troubled
reflection, and which supports, animates, and for a time preserves
everything that we can perceive. Hence, all philosophy consists in having
some knowledge of these Ideas. How is it possible to attain such knowledge?
By raising the mind from the particular to the general; by distinguishing
in each thing what is its permanent foundation, what it contains that is
least changing, least variable, least circumstantial. For example, a man is
a very complex being; he has countless feelings, countless diversified
ideas, countless methods of conduct and existence. What is his permanent
foundation? It is his conscience, which does not vary, undergoes no
transformation, always obstinately repeats the same thing; the foundation
of man, the eternal idea of which every man on earth is here the
reflection, is the consciousness of good; man is an incarnation on earth of
that part of God which is the will for good; according as he diverges from
or approaches more nearly to this will, is he less or more man.

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