Page:History of Philosophy.djvu/24

2 ing to which it denotes exactly the same as the German word "Wissenschaft" According to this meaning philosophy in general is the methodical work of thought, through which we are to know that which "is"; individual "philosophies" are the particular sciences in which individual realms of the existent are to be investigated and known.

With this first theoretical meaning of the word "philosophy" a second was very early associated. The development of Greek philosophy came at the time when the naive religious and ethical consciousness was in process of disintegration. This not only made the questions as to man's vocation and tasks more and more important for scientific investigation (cf. below, Part 1. ch. 14), but also made instruction in the right conduct of life appear as an essential aim, and finally as the main content of philosophy or science. Thus philosophy in the Hellenistic period received the practical meaning of an art of life based upon scientific principles ―a meaning for which the way had already been prepared by the Sophists and Socrates.

In consequence of this change, purely theoretical interest passed over to the particular "philosophies," which now in part assumed the names of their special subjects of research, historical or belonging to natural science, while mathematics and medicine kept all the more rigorously that independence which they had possessed from the beginning with relation to science in general. The name of philosophy, however, remained attached to those scientific efforts which hoped to win from the most general results of human knowledge a conviction for the direction of life, and which finally culminated in the attempt (made by Neo-Platonism) to create from such a philosophy a new religion to replace the old that had been lost.