However, even if European philosophy were only a series of footnotes to Plato, and even though Aristotle had a millennial stranglehold on physics and astronomy, their influence, when all is said, depended not so much on the originality of their teaching, as on a process of natural selection in the evolution of ideas. Out of a number of ideological mutations, a given society will select that philosophy which it unconsciously feels to be best suited for its need.
