he problems of existence upon which ensued the arrest
of science and civilization for a thousand years. The Greeks were not
world-weary, and consequently, their joy in life and existence
contributed a minimum of relevance to their other-worldly dreams. Need it
be reasserted that the whole Platonic system, at its richest and best in
the Republic, is both an expression of and a compensation for a concrete
social situation? Once it was formulated it became a part of that
situation, altered it, served as another among the actual causes which
determined the subsequent history of philosophy. Its historic and
efficacious significance is defined by that situation, but philosophers
ignore the situation and accept the system as painters accept a
landscape--as the thing in itself.

Now, the aesthetic aspect of the philosophic system, its autonomy, and
consequent irrelevancy, are undeniable. Once it comes to be, its
intrinsic excellence may constitute its infallible justification for
existence, with no more to be said; and if its defenders or proponents
claimed nothing more for it than this immediate satisfactoriness, there
would be no quarrel with them. There is, however, present in their minds
a sense of the other bearings of their systems. They claim them, in any
event, to be _true_, that is, to be relevant to a situation regarded as
more important because more lastingly determinative of conduct, more
"real" than the situation of which they are born. Their systems are
offered, hence, as maps of life, as guides to the everlasting. That they
intend to define some method for the conservation of life eternally, is
clear enough from their initial motivation and formal issue: all the
Socratics, with their minds fixed on happiness or salvation according to
the prevalence of disillusionment among them; the Christian systems,
still Socratic, but as resolutely other-worldly as disillusioned
Buddhists; the systems of Spinoza, of Kant, the whole subsequent horde
of idealisms, up to the contemporary Germanoid and German idealistic
soliloquies,--they all declare that the vanity and multiplicity of life
as it is leads them to seek for the permanent and the meaningful, and
they each find it according to the idiosyncrasies of the particular
impulses and terms they start with. That their Snark turns out in every
case to be a Boojum is another story.

Yet this story is what gives philosophy, like religion, its social
significance. If its roots, a