assume
that we have read his words, but not his real thought. For the latter
there is always a psychological, if not a logical, justification.

And this brings me to the question of the language in which the
philosophers have expressed their thoughts. The more attentively one
reads the history of philosophy, the clearer it becomes that the number
of problems with which the philosophers have occupied themselves is not
overwhelmingly great. If each philosophy which confronts us seems to
us quite new and strange, it is because we have not arrived at the
stage at which it is possible for us to recognize old friends with new
faces. The same old problems, the problems which must ever present
themselves to reflective thought, recur again and again. The form is
more or less changed, and the answers which are given to them are not,
of course, always the same. Each age expresses itself in a somewhat
different way. But sometimes the solution proposed for a given problem
is almost the same in substance, even when the two thinkers we are
contrasting belong to centuries which lie far apart. In this case,
only our own inability to strip off the husk and reach the fruit itself
prevents us from seeing that we have before us nothing really new.

Thus, if we read the history of philosophy with patience and with
discrimination, it grows luminous. We come to feel nearer to the men
of the past. We see that we may learn from their successes and from
their failures; and if we are capable of drawing a moral at all, we
apply the lesson to ourselves.

CHAPTER XXIV

SOME PRACTICAL ADMONITIONS

88. BE PREPARED TO ENTER UPON A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS.--We have
seen that reflective thought tries to analyze experience and to attain
to a clear view of the elements that make it up--to realize vividly
what is the very texture of the known world, and what is the nature of
knowledge. It is possible to live to old age, as many do, without even
a suspicion that there may be such a knowledge as this, and
nevertheless to possess a large measure of rather vague but very
serviceable information about both minds and bodies.

It is something of a shock to learn that a multitude of questions may
be asked touching the most familiar things in our experience, and that
our comprehension of those things may be so vague that we grope in vain
for an answer. Space, time, matter, minds, realities,--with these
things we have to do every day. C