Читать книгу A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy онлайн

6 страница из 54

The Real Differences of the Three General Periods.

The history of philosophy is an organic development from an objective to a subjective view of life, with a traditional middle period in which subjective and objective mingle. Ancient thought is properly called objective, the mediæval traditional, the modern subjective. Can we briefly suggest what these abstract terms mean? By the objectivity of ancient thought is meant that the ancient, in making his reflections upon life, starts from the universe as a whole. From this outer point of view he tries to see the interconnections between things. Nature is reality; men and gods are a part of nature. Man’s mental processes even are a part of the totality of things. Even ethically man is not an independent individual, but the member of a state. When the ancient came to make distinctions between mind and matter, he did not think of man as the knower in antithesis to matter as the object known, but he thought of mind and matter as parts of one cosmos. The antithesis in ancient thought is rather between appearances and essence, between non-realities and realities with differing emphasis. The ancient attempts speculatively to reconstruct his world, but it is always from the point of view of the world.