The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

Creed and ritual have again replaced the good life; and instead of men being bound together by religion, they are divided into a thousand sects; and all manner of “pious nonsense”

the nadir of perversion is reached when the church becomes an instrument in the hands of a reactionary government; when the clergy, whose function it is to console and guide a harassed humanity with religious faith and hope and charity, are made the tools of theological obscurantism and political oppression.

Kant, sixty-five years young, hailed the Revolution with joy; and with tears in his eyes said to his friends: “Now I can say like Simeon, ‘Lord, let now Thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.’”

strife of each against all

nature’s method of developing the hidden capacities of life;

struggle is the indispensable accompanime...

If men were entirely social, man wo...

certain alloy of individualism and competition is required to make the human s...

“Without qualities of an unsocial kind . . . men might have led an Arcadian shepherd life in complete harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but in that case all their talents w...

“Thanks be then to nature for this unsociableness, for this envious jealousy and vanity, for this insatiable desire for possession and for power . . . . Man wishes concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; and she wills discord, in order that man may be impelled to a new exer...

“the same unsociableness which forced men into society becomes again the cause of each commonwealth’s assuming the attitude of uncontrolled freedom in its external relations,—i.e., as one state in relation to other states; and consequently, any one state must expect from any other the same sort of evils as formerly oppressed individuals and compelled them to enter into a civil union regulated by law.”

The whole meaning and movement of history is the ever greater restriction of pugnacity and violence, the continuous enlargement of the area of peace.

“The history of the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally and externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.”

there is no such progress, the labors of successive civilizations are like those of Sisyphus, who again and again “up the high hill heaved a huge round stone,” only to ...

“our rulers have no money to spend on public education . . . because all their resources are already placed to the account of the next war.”

Through the expense occasioned thereby, peace becomes in the long run more oppressive than a short war; and standing armies are thus the cause of aggressive wars undertaken in order to get rid of this burden.”

For in time of war the army would support itself on the country, by requisitioning, quartering, and pillaging; preferably in the enemy’s territory, but if necessary, in one’s own land; even this would be better than supporting it out of government funds.

Much of this militarism, in Kant’s judgment, was due to the expansion of Europe into Am...

“If we compare the barbarian instances of inhospitality . . . with the inhuman behavior of the civilized, and especially the commercial, states of our continent, the injustice practiced by them even in their first contact with foreign lands and peoples fills us with horror; the mere visiting of such peoples being regarded by them as equivalent to a conquest. America, the Negro lands. The Spice Islands, the Cape of Good Hope, etc., on being discovered, were treated as countries that belonged to nobody; for the aboriginal inhabitants were reckoned as nothing . . . . And all this has been done by nations who...

“The civil constitution of every state shall be republican, and war shall not be declared except by a plebiscite of all the citizens.”47 When those who must do the fighting have the right to decide between war and peace, history will no longer be written in blood.

“On the other hand, in a constitution where the subject is not a voting member of the state, and which is therefore not republican, the resolution to go to war is a matter of the smallest concern in the world. For in this case the ruler, who, as such, is not a mere citizen, but the owner of the state, need not in the least suffer personally by war, nor has he to sacrifice his pleasures of the table or the chase, or his pleasant palaces, court festivals, or the like. He can, therefore, resolve for war from insignificant reasons, as if it were but a hunting expedition; and as regards its propriety, he may leave the justification of it without concern to the diplomatic corps, who are always too ready to give their services for that purpose.”

After all, the function of government is to help and develop the individual, not to use and abuse him.

“Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.”

Kant therefore calls for equality:

but of opportunity for the development and application of ability;

he rejects all prerogatives of birth and class, and traces all hereditary privilege to some v...

the union of all monarchial Europe to crush the Revolution, he takes his stand, despite his seventy years, for the new order, for the establishment of democracy and liberty everywhere. Never ha...

But he was exhausted now; he had run his race and fought his fight. He withered slowly into a childlike senility that came at last to be a harmless insanity: one by one his sensibilities and his powers left him; and in 1804, aged seventy-nine,...

Yes: for space is an empty concept when not filled with perceived objects; “space” merely means that certain objects are, for the perceiving mind, at such and such a position, or distance, with reference to other perceived objects;

no: for without doubt, such spatial facts as the annual elliptical circuit of sun by earth, though statable only by a mind, are independent of any perception whatever; the deep and dark blue ocean rolled on before Byron told it to, and after he had ceased to be.

that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.

Concepts are an achievement, not a gift.

Morals are not absolute; they are a code of conduct more or less haphazardly developed for group survival, and varying with the nature and circumstances of the group:

Kant continues Luther and the Stoic Reformation, as Voltaire continues Montaigne and the Epicurean Renaissance.

But after a century of reaction against the absolutism of Kant’s ethics, we find ourselves again in a welter of urban sensualism and immorality, of ruthless individualism untempered with democratic conscience or aristocratic honor; and perhaps the day will soon come when a disintegrating civilization will welcome again the Kantian call to duty.

The fervor of the essay on “Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason” indicates a sincerity too intense to be questioned, and the attempt to change the base of religion from theology to morals, from creeds to conduct, could have come only from a profoundly religious mind.

the starry heavens above, the moral law within”;

“Men, if I may dare say it, are the creators of matter.”

Philosophy will never again be so naïve as in her earlier and simpler days; she must always be different hereafter, and profounder, because Kant lived.

These Hegel takes to be the categories named by Kant—Being, Quality, Quantity, Relation,

The most pervasive of them all is Relation; every idea is a group of relations; we can think of something only by relating it to something else, and perceiving its similarities and its differences.

An idea without relations of any kind is empty;

Being absolutely devoid of relations or qualities does not exist, and has no meaning whatever. This proposition led to an endless progeny of witticisms which still breed; and it proved to be at once a...

Of all relations, the most universal is that of contr...

Every condition of thought or of things—every idea and every situation in the world—leads irresistibly to its opposite, and then unites with it...

This “dialectical movement” runs through everything ...

the formation of our opinions on large issues is a decreasing oscillation between extremes;

The movement of evolution is a continuous development of oppositions, and their merging and reconciliation.

Fichte was right—thesis, antithesis and synthesis constitute the formula and secret of all d...

every condition of affairs contains a contradiction which evolution must resolve by a reconciling unity.