Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AOTIQUITY 5. The general characteristic of the human mind in ante-Christian, and particularly in Hellenic antiquity, may be described as its comparatively unreflecting belief in its own harmony and of its oneness with nature. The sense of an opposition, as existing either among its own different functions and interests or between the mind and nature and as needing reconciliation, is as yet relatively undeveloped. The philosophy of antiquity, like that of every period, partakes necessarily, in what concerns its chronological beginnings and its permanent basis, of the character of the period to which it belongs, while at the same time it tends, at least in its general and most fundamental direction, upward and beyond the level of the period, and so prepares the way for the transition to new and higher stages. For the solution of the difficult but necessary problem of a general historical nnd philosophical characterization of the great periods in the intellectual life of humanity, the Hegelian philosophy has labored most successfully. The conceptions which it employs for this end are derived from the nature of intellectual development in general, and they prove themselves empirically correct and just when compared with the particular phenomena of the different periods. Nevertheless, the opinion is scarcely to be approved, that philosophy always expresses itself most purely only in the universal consciousness of the time; the truth is, rather, that it rises above the range of the general consciousness through the power of independent thought, generating and developing new germs, and anticipating in theory the essential character of developments yet to come (thus, e. g., the Platonic state anticipates some of the essential characteristics of the form of the Ch...