The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

the future will see neither the present reality nor the visioned ideal, but a synthesis in which something of both will come together to beget a higher life.

And that higher stage too will divide into a productive contradiction, and rise to still loftier levels of organization, complexity, and unity.

The movement of thought, then, is the same as the movement of things; in each there is a dialectical progression from unity through diversity to diversity-in-unity. Thought and being foll...

The function of the mind, and the task of philosophy, is to discover the unity that lies potential in diversity;

the task of ethics is to unify character and conduct;

the task of politics is to unify individual...

The task of religion is to reach and feel that Absolute in which all opposites are resolved into unity, that great sum of being in which matter and mind, ...

In man the Absolute rises to self-consciousness, and becomes the Absolute Idea—that is, thought realizing itself as part of the Absolute, transcending individual limitations and purposes, and catching, underneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of all things.

“Reason is the substance of the universe; . . . the design of the world is absolutely rational.”

Not that strife and evil are mere negative imaginings; they are real enough; but they are, in wisdom’s perspective, s...

Struggle is the law of growth; character is built in the storm and stress of the world; and a man reaches his full height only through compul...

Even pain has its rationale; it is a sign of life and a stimulu...

Life is not made for happiness, but for achievement.

“The history of the world is not the theatre of happiness; periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony”;66 and this dull content is unworthy of a man.

History is made only in those periods in which the contradictions of reality are being resolved by growth, as the hesitations and awkwardness of youth...

History is a dialectical movement, almost a series of revolutions, in which people after people, and genius after genius, bec...

“Such individuals had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding; . . . but they had an insight into the requirements of the time—what was ripe for development. This was the very Truth for their age, for their world; the species next in order, so to speak, and which was already formed in the womb of time.”67

The deepest law of politics, therefore, is freedom—an open avenue to change; history is the growth of freedom, and the state is, or should be, freedom organized.

it is brutally true that “whatever is, is right.”

so in the years from 1827 to 1832 Germany lost Goethe, Hegel, and Beethoven. It was the end of an epoch, the last fine effort of Germany’s greatest age.

Yes, the Revolution was dead; and with it the life seemed to have gone out of the soul of Europe. That new heaven, called Utopia, whose glamour had relieved the twilight of the gods, had receded into a dim future where only young eyes could see it; the older ones had followed that lure long enough, and turned away from it now as a mockery of men’s hopes.

Only the young can live in the future, and only the old can live in the past; men were most of them forced to live in the present, and the present was a ruin.

Schopenhauer was born at Dantzig on February 22, 1788.

a man who has not known a mother’s love—and worse, has known a mother’s hatred—has no cause to be infatuated with the world.

“that the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and may therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it . . . . Noise is a torture to all intellectual people . . . . The superabundant display of vitality which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long.”

Many years later Schopenhauer was so sure of having solved the chief problems of philosophy that he thought of having his signet ring carved with an image of the Sphinx throwing herself down the abyss, as she had promised to do on having her riddles answered.

Nothing is to be had for gold but mediocrity

“No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very advantageous thing for the fools; for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.”

Almost without exception, philosophers have placed the essence of mind in thought and consciousness; man was the knowing animal, the animal rationale.

“Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside but only the crust.”

Under the conscious intellect is the conscious or unconscious will, a striving, persistent vital force, a spontaneous activity, a will of imperious desire. The intellect may seem at times to lead the will, but only as a guide leads his master; the will “is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see.”

We do not want a thing because we have found reasons for it, we find reasons for it because we want it; we even elaborate philosophie...

Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will.

“In doing accounts we make mistakes much oftener in our own favor than to our disadvantage; and this without the slightest dishonest intention.”

in general, the intellect is developed by danger, as in the fox, or by want, as in the criminal. But always it seems subordinate and instrumental to desire; when it attempts to displace the will, confusion follows. No one is more liable to mistakes than he who acts only on reflection.34

“Men are only apparently drawn from in front; in reality they are pushed from behind”;35 they think they are led on by what they see, when in truth they are driven on by what they feel,—by instincts of whose operation they are half the time unconscious.

Intellect is merely the minister of foreign affairs;

“The will is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind; . . . it is the will which,” through continuity of purpose, “gives unity to consciousness and holds together all its ideas and thoughts, accompanying them like a continuous harmony.”37 It is the organ-point of thought.

Popular language is correct when it prefers the “heart” to the “head”; it knows (because it has not reasoned about it) that a “good will” is profounder and more reliable than a clear mind; and when it calls a man “shrewd,” “knowing,” or “cunning” it implies its suspicion and dislike. “Brilliant qualities of mind win admiration, but never affection”; and “all religions promise a reward . . . for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.”

The will to know builds the brain just as the will to grasp forms the hand, or as the will to eat develops the digestive tract.40 Indeed, these pairs—these forms of will and these forms of flesh—are but two sides of one process and reality. The relation is best seen in emotion, where the feeling and the internal bodily changes form one complex unit.41

Every normal organism hastens, at maturity, to sacrifice itself to the task of reproduction: from the spider who is eaten up by the female he has just fertilized, or the wasp that devotes itself to gathering food for offspring it will never see, to the man who wears himself to ruin in the effort to feed and clothe and educate his children.

Reproduction is the ultimate purpose of every organism, and its strongest instinct;

for only so can the will con...

Thus the alternation of death and reproduction is as the pulsebeat of the species . . . .

Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (vol. i, p. 161), Goethe says: “Our spirit is a being of a nature quite indestructible, and its activity continues from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun, which seems to set only to our earthly eyes, but which, in reality, never sets, but shines on unceasingly.” Goethe has taken the simile from me, not I from him.61 Only in space and time do we seem to be separate beings; they constitute the “principle of individuation” which divides life into distinct organisms as appearing in different places or periods; space and time are the Veil of Maya,—Illusion hiding the unity of things. In reality there is only the species, only life, only will. “To understand clearly that the individual is only the phenomenon, not the thing-in-itself,” to see in “the constant change of matter the fixed permanence of form,”—this is the essence of philosophy.62 “The motto of history should run: Eadem, sed aliter.”63 The more things change, the more they remain the same. He to whom men and all things have not at all times appeared as mere phantoms or illusions, has no capacity for philosophy . . . . The true philosophy of history lies in perceiving that, in all the endless changes and motley complexity of events, it is only the self-same unchangeable being that is before us, which today pursues the same ends as it did yesterday and ever will. The historical philosopher has accordingly to recognize the identical character in all events, . . . and in spite of

all the variety of special circumstances, of costumes and manners and customs, has to see everywhere the same humanity . . . . To have read Herodotus is, from a philosophical point of view, to have studied enough

We like to believe that all history is a halting and imperfect preparation for the magnificent era of which we are the salt and summit; but this notion of progress is mere conceit and folly.

“In general, the wise in all ages have always said the same things, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done the opposite; and so it will continue. For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave the world as foolish and wicked as we found it.”65

“Spinoza says (Epistle 62) that if a stone which has been projected through the air had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add to this only that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me; and what in the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognize in myself as well, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognize as will.”66 But in neither the stone nor the philosopher is the will “free.” Will as a whole is free, for there is no other will beside it that could limit it; but each part of the universal Will—each species, each organism, each organ—is irrevocably determined by the whole.

Everyone believes himself à priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life, which just means that he can become another person. But à posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity; that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns, and as it were, play the part which he has undertaken, to the very end.