Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: world with those of the ancient. On one side, certainly, the whole reflective effort of the middle ages seems like a needlessly interrupting episode. We may connect the fundamental thoughts of the seventeenth century more easily with those of Plato and Aristotle than with those of the representative exponents of the medieval or scholastic philosophy. We require, however, to consider another side of the question, which will make the real connexion clearer. No philosophy is ever able to do more than read significance and meaning into the mass of experience that may be possessed. Reflexion can he fruitfully exercised only on the concrete material supplied to it. The most retrograde periods of philosophical thinking have been those in which an unnatural separation was made between the general conceptions of man's reason, his place and destiny in the scheme of things, and the concrete material presented in his ordinary experience of nature and man. It was the misfortune of the middle ages that, in their case, this separation did occur. It was a result of their historical position. The peculiarity of the middle ages was their loss of the inheritance of acquired scientific knowledge which the Greeks had possessed and their acquisition of the great chaotic mass of speculation that had grown up with Christianity. Further, into the lapse of the middle ages were suddenly introduced the results of Greek thought, which supplied the scholastic thinking with a body of general ideas more fully elaborated than anything they had before, and yet developed in connexion with a concrete experience of a very imperfect kind. Even the Aristotelian metaphysic, though important, keeps as its standard of reference for reality a picture of nature essentially incomplete and ill founded. Its fundamental ideas, ...
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