Page:The Dialogues of Plato v. 1.djvu/25



Rh Ancient and modern philosophy throw a hght upon one another: but they should be compared, not confounded. Although the connexion between them is sometimes acci- dental, it is often real. The same questions are discussed by them under different conditions of language and civil- ization ; but in some cases a mere word has survived, while nothing or hardly anything of the pre-Socratic, Platonic, or Aristotelian meaning is retained. There are other ques- tions familiar to the moderns, which have no place in ancient philosophy. The world has grown older in two thousand years, and has enlarged its stock of ideas and methods of reasoning. Yet the germ of modern thought is found in ancient, and we may claim ^o have inherited, notwithstanding many accidents of time and place, the spirit of Greek philosophy. There is, however, no con- tinuous growth of the one into the other, but a new beginning, partly artificial, partly arising out of the ques- tionings of the mind itself, and also receiving a stimulus from the study of ancient writings.

Considering the great and fundamental differences which exist in ancient and modern philosophy, it seems best that we should at first study them separately, and seek for the interpretation of either, especially of the ancient, from itself only, comparing the same author with himself and with his contemporaries, and with the general state of thought and feeling prevalent in his age. After- wards comes the remoter light which they cast on one another. We begin -to feel that the ancients had the same thoughts as ourselves, the same difficulties which characterize all periods of transition, almost the same opposition between science and religion. Although we cannot maintain that ancient and modern philosophy are one and continuous (as has been affirmed with more truth