other than to concede it. It is true. It is mild.
Only a lover of philosophy can know -- with
the intimacy of a particeps criminis -- how
deeply philosophy has fallen from her ancient
heights. Looking back to Greece we find that
philosophy there was a real pursuit of wisdom,
a very earnest effort to arrive by discussion and
self-criticism at a way of life, a philosophia vitæ
magistra, a knowledge of the individual and social
good and of the means thereto, a conscious direc-
tion of social institutions to ethical ends; philos-
ophy and life in those days were bound up with
one another as mechanics is now bound up with
efficient construction. Even in the Middle Ages
philosophy meant coördinate living, synthetic
behavior; with all their reputation for cobweb-
spinning, the Scholastics were much closer to
life in their thinking than most modern philos-
ophers have been in theirs.

The lapse of philosophy from her former
significance and vitality is the result of the exag-
gerated emphasis placed on the epistemological
problem by modern thinkers; and this in turn
is in great part due to the difficulties on which
Descartes stumbled in his effort to reconcile
his belief in mechanism with his desire to placate
the Jesuits. How minor a rôle is played by the
problems of the relation between subject and
object, the validity of knowledge, epistemological
realism and idealism, in a frankly mechanist
philosophy, appears in Bacon, Hobbes, and

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