Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy is popular intellectual history, first serialized and then gathered into a book in the early twentieth century, that walks a general reader through the major figures of Western speculative thought from Plato to the American pragmatists. It is expository rather than narrative: Durant treats philosophers as personalities and dramatists of ideas, quoting them liberally and arguing with them, so that the book reads less like a textbook than like a long, opinionated lecture delivered by an enthusiast. Its chapters move chronologically and by figure—Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Nietzsche—with closing surveys of European and American contemporaries.
“All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew “ more and more about less and less,” and the philosophical speculator, who knew less and less about more and more.”
Durant’s own preface sets the terms. He wrote outlines, he says, because “a million voices called for them”: knowledge had grown so vast and so specialized that the specialist knew more and more about less and less while the general speculator knew less and less about more and more. The teacher’s job, as he sees it, is to mediate between the expert and the nation, to find old terms for new truths, and to keep learning from hardening into scholasticism. He admits his omissions plainly—scholastic philosophy, and worse, the whole of Chinese and Hindu thought—and defends his neglect of epistemology on the ground that “epistemology has kidnapped modern philosophy.” Analysis belongs to science; philosophy’s business is synthesis, and its reward is wisdom rather than knowledge.
From Athens to the Modern World
The Preface and the Case for Outlines
Durant opens by answering his publishers, who wanted him to explain the vogue for “outlines” and to confess the book’s faults. The outline, he says, arose because a million voices called for it: knowledge had swollen past any single mind’s grasp, with the sciences multiplying in every direction while philosophy, unable to coordinate them, withdrew into narrow technical lanes. The specialist now knew more and more about less and less, the speculator less and less about more and more; facts crowded out understanding, jargon cut knowledge off from life, and popular ignorance flourished in the midst of learning. The teacher’s true office, he insists, is to stand between the specialist and the nation, finding old terms for new truths; otherwise civilization comes to rest on esoteric erudition. He traces the lineage of the outline from Plato’s popular Dialogues through Wells’s Outline of History—”full of errors, and a liberal education”—to Breasted and Robinson, van Loon, and Macy, noting the flood of imitations and the snobbery that followed.
Admitted Faults and the Reader Addressed
Among the book’s defects Durant owns the omission of scholastic philosophy and, worse, of Chinese and Hindu thought—Lao-tze, Confucius, Mencius, Chwang-tze, Buddha, Shankara—a provincial gap he does not excuse. He defends slighting epistemology, citing his Kant chapter and the example of Chinese sages who were statesmen and lawgivers concerned with actual life; Confucius, he notes, is “disreputably intelligible.” The book’s humor he defends too, and he insists it was meant as an introduction, not a substitute, quoting his own Spinoza passage urging repeated reading. Sales of philosophical classics rose some two hundred per cent. To the reader he explains that the book centers speculative thought on dominant personalities, omitting lesser figures, because epistemology “has kidnapped modern philosophy”: analysis belongs to science, while philosophy must supply synthesis for wisdom.
On the Uses of Philosophy
Philosophy, the Introduction proposes, offers both pleasure and a lure: men want meaning, perspective, to see things in the light of eternity, to coordinate their desires. It seems stagnant only because it deals with problems not yet open to science; every science begins as philosophy and ends as art. Science is analytical description, philosophy synthetic interpretation; science gives knowledge, philosophy wisdom. Logic, esthetics, ethics, politics, metaphysics all fall within it. Durant will study philosophers rather than mere philosophies, following Emerson and Socrates’ advice to Crito.
Greece and the Birth of Speculation
The chapter on Plato begins with the land itself—a skeleton-like hand of peninsulas and islands whose broken terrain bred city-states: Sparta in Laconia, Athens in Attica, and dozens more. Athens’s eastern position and the port of Piraeus made her a trading mart, and contact begot comparison and thought; traders were the first sceptics, and the first Greek philosophers were astronomers. Physical philosophy culminated in Democritus’s materialism of atoms and space, which passed underground in Plato’s day to surface later in Epicurus and Lucretius. The Sophists turned inward—Gorgias, Hippias, Protagoras, Prodicus—some holding nature good and civilization bad, others that might is right and morality an invention of the weak. This attacked democracy, and well it might: of Athens’s 400,000 inhabitants 350,000 were slaves, few freemen attended the assembly, and the jury courts held over a thousand members chosen by lot. In the Peloponnesian War Sparta defeated Athens; Critias, pupil of Socrates and uncle of Plato, led a rich man’s revolution that failed and cost him his life.
The Republic and the Challenge of Thrasymachus
The Dialogues, and The Republic above all, form a comprehensive treatise—metaphysics, theology, ethics, psychology, pedagogy, politics, and art—and it addresses problems still modern: communism, feminism, birth control, eugenics, Nietzschean aristocracy, Rousseauian education. Emerson’s “Plato is philosophy, and philosophy Plato” is applied, and Omar’s words about the Koran: “Burn the libraries, for their value is in this book.” The ethical argument opens in the house of Cephalus, with Glaucon, Adeimantus, and the gruff Sophist Thrasymachus. Asked what justice is, Socrates looses the dogs of philosophic war until Thrasymachus roars that justice is the interest of the stronger, that governments make laws for themselves and call obedience just. The doctrine links to Nietzsche, to Stirner’s “a handful of might is better than a bagful of right,” and to Callicles in the Gorgias, who calls morality a slave-invention of the weak; its real virtues are courage and intelligence. Athenian imperialism echoes it—the envoys at Melos: “
Bacon’s Slow Ascent
Sir Nicholas Bacon died in 1579 with an estate in mind for his son, and death outran the plan. Francis, summoned to London at eighteen, found himself fatherless and penniless, bred to most of the luxuries of the age and finding forced simplicity hard to bear. He took up law and began importuning influential relatives for office, letters of almost begging grace and vigor that came to little—perhaps because he did not underrate his own ability and treated place as his due, perhaps because he protested his loyalty too much. Politics, the passage moralizes, is like love: one should not give oneself wholly, since gratitude feeds on expectation.
He climbed without being lifted, each step costing years. Elected to Parliament for Taunton in 1583, he was returned again and again. His eloquence was terse and vivid—”an orator without oratory.” Ben Jonson testified that no man spoke more neatly, pressedly, weightily, or with less emptiness; hearers dared not cough or glance aside lest they lose something, and feared lest he make an end.
One friend was generous: the Earl of Essex, whom Elizabeth loved unsuccessfully and learned to hate. In 1595 Essex, atoning for failing to win Bacon a post, gave him the estate at Twickenham—a gift that might presume to bind him for life, and did not. When Essex plotted to seize the Queen and choose her successor, Bacon wrote letter after letter protesting the treason, warning that loyalty to his Queen outranked gratitude to his friend. Essex failed, was arrested; Bacon pled for him until the Queen bade him speak of other subjects. Freed, Essex gathered armed men, marched into London, and tried to raise revolution. Bacon turned on him angrily, took a place in the prosecuting office, and helped try him for treason. Essex was found guilty and put to death. Bacon’s part made him unpopular for a while; thereafter he lived among enemies watching to destroy him. Ambition gave him no rest, always a year ahead of his income, lavish in display because display was policy. He married at forty-five with a pompous ceremony that made a great gap in the dowry, and in 1598 was arrested for debt. Yet he advanced: Solicitor-General in 1606, Attorney-General in 1613, Lord Chancellor in 1618 at fifty-seven.
The Essays and the New Note
His elevation seemed to realize Plato’s dream of the philosopher-king; step by step with power he had mounted philosophy’s summits, his vast learning seeming but an incident of a turbulent career. His motto: one lives best by the hidden life. He hoped to be philosopher and statesman like Seneca, suspecting the double direction would shorten his reach. Studies, he held, cannot be their own end; knowledge unapplied is pale academic vanity. “Of Studies” warns that too much time in books is sloth, too much ornament affectation, judging wholly by rules the humor of a scholar; crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, wise men use them. Here the text hears a new note—the end of scholasticism, the divorce of knowledge from use and observation, experience and results, culminating in pragmatism. Yet Bacon loved books: “without philosophy I care not to live,” he wrote, describing himself as naturally fitted for literature, borne by destiny against his genius into active life. His first publication, “The Praise of Knowledge” (1592), argues that the mind is the man and knowledge the mind’s; that intellectual pleasures exceed those of sense and affection; that knowledge clears the mind of perturbations, since vain imaginations and ill-proportioned estimations are clouds of error turning into storms.
The Essays (1597–1623) show him torn between politics and philosophy: “Of Honor and Reputation” grants every degree of honor to political and military achievement, none to letters; “Of Truth” calls inquiry, knowledge, and belief of truth the sovereign good of human nature, and notes that in books “we converse with the wise, as in action with fools.” Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, a few chewed and digested—and the Essays deserve the last, much meat in a small dish. Bacon abhors padding, offers infinite riches in a little phrase; his prose is supreme as Shakespeare’s verse, compact yet polished like Tacitus, concise from the Latin idiom, rich in Elizabethan metaphor. No English writer is so fertile in pregnant comparisons, and their lavish array is the one defect—endless metaphors falling like whips on nerves. The Essays are rich heavy food, best taken four or five at a time. Bacon frankly accepts the Epicurean ethic, rejecting the counsel “Use not that you may not wish, wish not that you may not fear” as the mark of a weak, diffident spirit.
Diderot and the Encyclopedists
The boldest spirit of the French Enlightenment was Denis Diderot, whose scattered ideas found a home in the salon of Baron d’Holbach, the meeting place of his circle. Holbach’s System of Nature argued that ignorance and fear invented the gods, that fancy and deceit adorned them, and that weakness, credulity, and custom keep them alive because men’s blindness serves the interests of tyranny. Diderot pushed the thought further: belief in God and submission to autocracy rise and fall together, and men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Materialism, he admitted, probably oversimplifies the world—matter itself may be alive, and consciousness cannot be reduced to mere motion—but it made a serviceable weapon against the Church, to be used until a better one came along. Meanwhile knowledge had to be spread and industry encouraged, since industry breeds peace and knowledge breeds a new natural morality. Through the Encyclopédie, issued volume by volume from 1752 to 1772, Diderot and d’Alembert carried the campaign forward. The Church suppressed the early volumes; as the opposition hardened, his comrades deserted him, but he worked on in a fury, invigorated by rage and calling the theologians’ tirades against reason indecent. These men never doubted that the intellect was the final test of truth and goodness, and that freed reason would build Utopia within a few generations. Diderot did not suspect that the young Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom he had just brought to Paris, carried the seeds of a revolt against reason itself.
Voltaire’s Philosophic Dictionary
Voltaire moved easily within the Encyclopedists’ circle; they hailed him as leader and he accepted their incense, though he thought some of their ideas needed pruning. He wrote articles for them with delighting facility, then produced his own Philosophic Dictionary, taking subjects alphabetically and proving at last that he was a philosopher—terse, brief, clear, witty. Like Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, he begins with doubt and a supposedly clean slate, taking St. Thomas the Doubter as his patron. He thanks Bayle for teaching him doubt, rejects every system, suspects each sect leader of being a bit of a quack, and holds that metaphysical systems are to philosophers what novels are to women. Only charlatans are certain; we know nothing of first principles; doubt is disagreeable but certainty ridiculous. He tells of the good Brahmin who wishes he had never been born, since forty years of study left him unable to say what produces thought, while his ignorant old neighbor, who believes in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, is happy. The Brahmin confesses he would be happy if he were as ignorant as she, “and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire”—a reply that impressed Voltaire more than anything. Even if philosophy ends in Montaigne’s “Que sais-je?” it remains man’s greatest and noblest adventure; better modest advances than new systems woven from a lying imagination. We should not invent principles to explain everything but analyze matter exactly, then diffidently see whether it fits any principle. Bacon showed the road science might follow; Descartes did the opposite, wishing to divine nature rather than study it, and made only romances in philosophy. It is given us to calculate, weigh, measure, observe—that is natural philosophy; almost all the rest is chimera.
The Calas Affair and “Ecrasez l’Infame”
Left to himself, Voltaire might never have passed from courteous scepticism to arduous controversy; aristocratic circles agreed with him, priests smiled with him, cardinals considered making him a good Capuchin. What turned him into a relentless anti-clerical was the news from Toulouse, the seventh city of France, where the Catholic clergy held absolute sovereignty, commemorating the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in frescoes and celebrating the Massacre of St. Bartholomew as a feast. No Protestant could be a lawyer, physician, apothecary, grocer, bookseller, or printer, and no Catholic could keep a Protestant servant or clerk; in 1748 a woman was fined three thousand francs for using a Protestant midwife. Jean Calas, a Protestant of Toulouse, had a daughter who became Catholic and a son who hanged himself, presumably from business disappointment. A law required suicides to be stripped naked, dragged face-down through the streets on a hurdle, and hanged on a gibbet; to spare the family that disgrace the father asked relatives and friends to testify to a natural death. Rumor then spoke of murder and hinted that the father had killed the son to prevent his imminent conversion. Calas was arrested and tortured, and died soon after in 1761; his ruined, hunted family fled to Ferney and sought Voltaire’s aid.
The Scientific Ferment
The Industrial Revolution, itself born of a little science, was now returning the favour, and England in Spencer’s youth hummed with discovery. Newton and Herschel had brought the stars down to earth, Boyle and Davy had opened the treasures of chemistry, Faraday was making the discoveries that would electrify the world, and Rumford and Joule had shown that force is transformable and equivalent, that energy is conserved. The sciences were growing so complex that a bewildered age would welcome a synthesis. Above all, biology and the doctrine of evolution stirred the intellectual air. That doctrine had been built internationally: Kant had mused on apes becoming men, Goethe had written of the metamorphosis of plants, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck had argued that species evolve from simpler forms through inheritance of the effects of use and disuse, and in 1830 St. Hilaire had nearly beaten Cuvier in the great debate on evolution, a revolt against fixed rules and a changeless world.
By the eighteen-fifties evolution was in the air. Spencer had stated the idea long before Darwin, in an essay on “The Development Hypothesis” and in his Principles of Psychology. Then came the papers of Darwin and Wallace before the Linnaean Society, and in 1859 the Origin of Species, which the good bishops thought shattered the old world. This was no vague notion but a detailed, richly documented theory of evolution by natural selection, the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. Within a decade everyone was talking evolution. What lifted Spencer to the crest of that wave was the clarity that suggested applying the idea to every field of study, and the range that brought almost all knowledge to pay tribute to his theory. As mathematics had dominated philosophy in the seventeenth century and psychology in the eighteenth, so biology now became the background of philosophic thought. The epochal ideas were the piecemeal work of obscure men, but they attach to the men who coordinated and clarified them, as the New World took the name of Vespucci, who drew the map. Spencer was the Vespucci of the Darwinian age, and something of its Columbus too.
The Uneducated Philosopher
He was born at Derby in 1820, into Dissenting stock on both sides. His father’s mother had followed John Wesley; his father’s brother, an Anglican clergyman, led a Wesleyan movement within the Church, never attended a concert or a play, and threw himself into political reform. The drive to heresy strengthened in the father and culminated in the almost obstinate individualism of Herbert himself. The father never invoked the supernatural to explain anything; one acquaintance called him a man without faith or religion whatever, though Herbert thought this an exaggeration. He leaned to science and wrote an Inventional Geometry; in politics he was an individualist who would never take off his hat to anyone, whatever his rank. If he did not understand a question his wife put to him, he would let it go unanswered rather than ask what it was—a futility he maintained all his life. One is reminded of Herbert’s later resistance to the extension of State functions.
Father, uncle and grandfather were all teachers of private schools, yet the son who would become the most famous English philosopher of his century remained until forty an uneducated man. Herbert was lazy and his father indulgent. At thirteen he was sent to study under a severe uncle at Hinton; he promptly ran away and trudged home to Derby—forty-eight miles the first day, forty-seven the next, twenty the third, on bread and beer. He returned a few weeks later and stayed three years, the only systematic schooling he ever had. He could not say later what he learned there: no history, no natural science, no general literature. He boasted that he never had a single lesson in English, and remained without formal knowledge of syntax to the end—facts worth knowing, since their implications upset assumptions universally accepted. At forty he tried the Iliad and gave up after six books, preferring to pay a large sum than read to the end. His secretary Collier reports that Spencer never finished any book of science. Even in his favourite fields he had no systematic instruction: he burnt his fingers and achieved a few explosions in chemistry, browsed among the bugs about school and home, and picked up something of strata and fossils in his later work as a civil engineer. For the rest he gathered his science casually as he went along.
The Ethics of Evolution
Spencer thought industrial reconstruction so vital that he gave the largest section of The Principles of Ethics to it, calling it the last part of his task to which all the rest was subsidiary. As a mid-Victorian moralist he sought a natural ethic to replace the code tied to traditional faith, arguing that if supernatural sanctions of right conduct go, no blank is left, since natural sanctions exist no less peremptory and covering a wider field. The new morality must rest on biology: accept organic evolution and ethical conceptions are determined.
The Two Russells
Bertrand Russell arrives as heir to one of England’s oldest political dynasties—his grandfather Lord John Russell a Liberal prime minister who fought for free trade, universal education, Jewish emancipation—yet he rejects inheritance outright and earns his own living. Dismissed from Cambridge for pacifism, he turns the world into his university, a traveling Sophist supported by admirers. Durant sees two Russells: the mathematical logician who died in the war, and the near-mystic communist risen from his shroud. The tender mystic strain was always there, surfacing first as a mountain of algebraic formulae, then as a socialism that looks more like a religion than a philosophy. Mysticism and Logic names the tension exactly: a merciless attack on mystical illogicality, followed by a glorification of scientific method that itself smells of mysticism.
The Divinity of Mathematics
In 1914 he struck observers as a formula with legs, cold-blooded and abstract. He never saw a motion picture until Bergson’s cinematographic analogy for the intellect sent him to one performance as a philosophical task; Bergson’s vital impetus left him cold—a pretty poem, nothing more. His god was mathematics. The world’s woes, he held, came largely from mysticism and culpable obscurity; the first law of morality is to think straight: better the world should perish than that anyone believe a lie. Mathematics thrilled him with its cold, austere beauty, like sculpture, capable of stern perfection. He counted the solution of the mathematical infinite the greatest achievement of the age, and thought it a scandal that Euclid was still taught to English boys. He delighted in challenges to self-evident truth—parallel lines that meet, wholes no greater than their parts—and in the paradox that even numbers, though but half of all numbers, are just as numerous. That is the point of the infinite: a whole containing parts as numerous as itself. Durant’s footnote steers lay readers away from the technical volumes toward the clearer Mysticism and Logic, and flags The Philosophy of Leibnitz, The Analysis of Mind and The Analysis of Matter, the post-war tracts (with Why Men Fight the best of them), and Roads to Freedom, a genial survey rediscovering Diogenes with a Columbus’s enthusiasm. What draws Russell to mathematics is its rigid impersonality: here alone are eternal truth and absolute knowledge, the Ideas of Plato, the eternal order of Spinoza. Philosophy should imitate it, confining itself to propositions exact and true before all experience—a strange positivist demanding the a priori.
Santayana’s Materialism
Santayana closes in a materialism neither cold nor comfortless: a theory can be passionate, and a vision bringing order into all we know may be more beautiful or terrible than music. Materialism dashes hopes of special providences and a second life, but the thorough materialist, like laughing Democritus, delights in a mechanism capable of marvellous shapes and exciting passions—the pleasure of a visitor in a natural-history museum. Yet the butterflies, could they speak, would remind us a museum shows only lifeless things; reality eludes preservation and lives in the pangs of passion and the endless flow of life. A friend recalls him standing alone on the tender at Southampton, calmly observing passengers until the deck cleared. His philosophy is fearless self-expression, a sombre soul written in statuesque prose—the finished expression of a dying and nascent age, in which men cannot be wise and free because they have abandoned old ideas without finding new ones.
William James and the Cash-Value of Truth
James’s philosophy is European in everything but the place of composition; his voice is American. He used “cash-value,” “results,” “profits” to reach the man in the street, his racy vernacular making pragmatism the mental correlate of the strenuous Roosevelt while phrasing the tender-minded trust in old theology. Born in New York in 1842 to a Swedenborgian mystic, schooled in France, he took his M.D. at Harvard in 1870 and taught there until his death in 1910. The Principles of Psychology (1890) was his greatest achievement, the keenest introspection since Hume; he defined philosophy as thinking about things in the most comprehensive possible way. Thought, he held, is a stream, not a mirror; consciousness is a flux of relations, not an entity, and beyond phenomena there is nothing. In 1878 Peirce’s essay “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” gave him his test: meaning lies in consequences in action. Truth became relative to human need—the cash-value of an idea, the expedient in our thinking, one species of good; verity is verification. Pragmatism shifts emphasis from first things to last things, from origins to fruits.
The Multiverse and the Finite God
Applied to God, the Scholastic definition leads to Calvinism and fatalism, and mechanistic determinism fares no better.
The Philosopher as Character
What holds the book together is Durant’s conviction that a philosophy is inseparable from the life that produced it. He is a biographer first and an expositor second. Plato arrives through the broken terrain of Greece and the maritime bustle of Athens; Aristotle through the Macedonian court and the medical fraternity of his father; Bacon through begging letters to Burghley, the Essex prosecution, and a career that kept him always a year ahead of his income; Voltaire through the Bastille, the lottery, and the Calas affair; Kant through the linden walk and the umbrella carried by old Lampe. The ideas are never presented in a vacuum. Durant wants the reader to see that metaphysics has a temperament, that a system of ethics can grow out of a man’s disappointments, and that the “philosopher-king” is a dream entertained by men who have watched mobs and ministers at close range.
This biographical instinct shapes his judgments. Plato’s Republic is read as the work of a man frightened by democratic turbulence into an excessive love of order—”a Sparta or a Prussia,” Durant says, not an ideal state—yet he does homage to the underlying insight that the world needs rule by its wisest, and he proposes adapting it: keep democracy, restrict office to the trained, and open that training to every child regardless of means. Aristotle’s ethics of the golden mean and of excellence as habit is treated as the codification of a distinctly Greek attitude, the Delphic meden agan, and his ideal man—sedate, self-sufficient, slow to admire—is presented with a mixture of admiration and amusement as “the Superman of Aristotle.” Bacon is the eloquent herald of a science he could not practice, a man who rejected Copernicus and ignored Harvey yet gave the Royal Society its model and the French Encyclopédie its patron. Spinoza is the slow book that must be read like Euclid, whose God is the invariable order of nature and whose psychology studies men “as though concerned with lines and planes and solids.” Voltaire is the laughing destroyer, the sceptic who thanked Bayle for teaching him doubt and who turned from urbane mockery to relentless war on superstition after the Calas family came to his door.
What the Quarrels Are Really About
Certain arguments recur across the chapters and give the book its spine. One is the contest between reason and the senses: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is introduced as an answer to Hume, an attempt to show that knowledge is not all derived from sensation and that the mind contributes the structure of experience. Another is the question of determinism and freedom, which Spinoza answers by denying free will outright—men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions but ignorant of their causes—and which Schopenhauer and Nietzsche will take up in different keys. A third is the standing quarrel between the morality of the strong and the morality of the weak, first staged in the Republic when Thrasymachus roars that justice is the interest of the stronger, and revived in Nietzsche’s laughing lions. Durant treats these not as antiquarian puzzles but as live options, and he is candid about his own sympathies: he prefers synthesis to analysis, wisdom to technique, and the humanized knowledge of the generalist to the narrow certainty of the specialist.
The Uses of an Outline
The book’s significance lies less in any original contribution to philosophy than in the door it opened. Durant reports that sales of philosophical classics rose some two hundred per cent after his chapters appeared, and a New York Public Library official confirmed the increased demand; the Story was, by his own account, an introduction and not a substitute, and he quotes his own Spinoza passage urging the reader to come back and read the originals again. Its method—biography, generous quotation, plain speech, a willingness to argue and to laugh—became a template for popular philosophy in the decades that followed. The book also preserves a particular moment in American intellectual life: a moment when a serious writer could assume that a general reader wanted to know what Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche actually said, and could be trusted with the answer. Durant’s closing pages on the contemporary philosophers, and his earlier insistence that philosophy must coordinate the sciences rather than retreat into narrow lanes, amount to a defense of the public intellectual as such. Whether or not one shares his tastes—his impatience with epistemology, his fondness for the vivid phrase—the book makes its case by example: that the history of philosophy is a record of human beings trying to see things in the light of eternity, and that the attempt is worth an outline.
