the knowledge or study of nature and morality, founded on reason and experience.

The philosophers among the most ancient people of the world were called sages or wise men, as appears from history both sacred and profane. Thales and Pythagoras in Greece were the first among those that made an open profession of this science, who thought the title of sage too fatidicous, and took the more modest name of philosophers, or lovers or studiers of wisdom. Thales, who was a native of Miletus in Ionia, and the first of the seven sages, was the founder of the Ionic sect; his most illustrious disciples were Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, and Archelaus. Anaxagoras employed himself entirely in the contemplation of the stars; and when he was asked if he had no concern for his country, replied, pointing to heaven with his finger, "I incessantly regard my country." Pythagoras founded the sect that was called Italic, because it was settled in that part of Italy which was called Great Greece, and which now makes part of the kingdom of Naples. He borrowed from the Egyptians a mysterious manner of teaching by numbers; and to that he added a certain harmony, by which he explained the perfection in all objects. He believed the world to be animated, intelligent, and round. Not knowing what to do with the soul after its separation from the body, he invented the doctrine of the metempsychosis. His disciples of greatest note were Ocellus of Lucania, Archytas of Tarentum, Philolaus of Croton, Parmenides and Zeno, both of Elea, and Melissus of Samos. Zeno was the inventor of the dialectic; the others applied themselves closely to the study of natural philosophy, and to the investigation of its principles.

Socrates followed the career of these first philosophers, but turned almost all his studies towards morality. His master was Archelaus the Pythagorean. He was the first who began to reduce the confused ideas of those who had gone before him into method; for which reason he is called Cicero the father of philosophy. His life was a model of frugality, moderation, and patience; and his doctrine abounds with wisdom.

Socrates, discovering a greater genius in Plato than in any of his other disciples, had a particular attachment to him, and his labours were not lost; for, among all the celebrated men who came out of the school of Socrates, Plato was, doubtless, the most renowned. He taught at Athens, and had in a short time many disciples. He established his school in the academy, which was a place without the town, and from thence his followers were called Academics. According to Plato, the soul of man is only a ray from the Divinity. He believed that this particle, united to its principle, knew all things; but when united to a body, it contracted ignorance and impurity by that union. He did not entirely neglect natural philosophy, like Socrates, but inquired into many questions which relate to that science. He believed that all things consisted of two principles, God and matter. He likewise cultivated astronomy. His morality was the same in substance with that of Socrates.

The disciples of Plato formed also many new sects. That of which Aristotle was the founder is doubtless the most illustrious. This philosopher was the first who formed, from the several parts of philosophy, a complete system. No one before him had treated separately, and from principles, the different parts of this science. He did not regard logic as a part of philosophy, but as a proper method whereby to dispose the understanding to discover the truths that it contains. The morality of Aristotle is the most perfect of all his works. His physics consist of notions and terms that are vague, and as trifling as obscure. His disciples and their followers were called the Peripatetics of Lyceum, where he had fixed his school.

Aristotle was not the only disciple of Plato who deviated from the sentiments of that great man; there were others who likewise placed themselves at the heads of different sects. Arcelias was the author of a sect that was called the Middle Academy. He declared that there was nothing either certain or true; and that the positive and negative might be maintained in all sorts of subjects. Lacydes, who taught in the same school as Plato, 56 years after Arcelias, was the chief of another sect that was called the New Academy. He acknowledged that there was a degree of probability, but that we could not assuredly know that anything was absolutely true. Pyrrho, about the same time, placed himself also at the head of a sect. He improved on the dogma of the Academics; and maintained that it was impossible to comprehend anything; but Pyrrho could not comprehend himself. He believed that there was nothing true, nothing but what might be said to be either this or that. His followers were called Pyrrhonians, or more commonly skeptics, because they searched without ever being able to discover any one thing.

About the same time arose two sects, who, with principles diametrically opposite, rendered themselves highly celebrated, and divided at first the wits of Greece, and afterward those of the rest of the world; and these were Zeno and Epicurus. Zeno was of Citium, a city in Cyprus. He taught in the porticoes of Athens, from whence his disciples were called Stoics. The most famous dogma of Zeno and the Stoics consisted in the principle of morality, which was, to live in conformity to nature, that is to say, according to the object of our desires: on this principle, Philosophy, ciple, and on divers others, they formed the idea of a philosophy altogether extravagant, and insensible to all external objects. The physics of Zeno had nothing new but the terms. The other sect, which flourished at the same time, was that of Epicurus; and they were called Epicureans. This philosopher taught publicly at Athens, his native country, at the age of thirty-two years. He rejected all the chicaneeries and subtleties of logic, and sought the truth by means of the senses. He attached himself greatly to morality, to which likewise tended all his other studies: and his morality was as consistent to the nature of man, as that of Zeno was contradictory; seeing that his first principle was, that pleasure is the pursuit of man, and that it consists in health of body and tranquility of mind; and that it is the source and the end of a happy life, &c. Epicurus was also engaged, but with less success, in the labyrinth of metaphysics, and in physics: he adopted the system of atoms, of which Democritus was the first author. In short, although the evil interpretations and calumnies of his adversaries, he inculcated by his doctrine, and by his example, frugality and sobriety; and, according to him, death is not an object of terror: "For," says he, "it is nothing so long as life subsists; and when it arrives, life is no more; no man has ever felt his death."

It is evident, that these ancient systems of philosophy are at great variance with each other; and as truth is constantly uniform, it follows, that the greatest part of these opinions cannot be true. This consideration engaged Patomon of Alexandria, under the emperor Augustus, to select all that he found most rational in the doctrines of all the other philosophers, whereof he composed a system, and founded a sect; and he, for that reason, gave to his doctrine the name of the eclectic philosophy, from a Greek word which signifies to select.

The doctrine of Plato was at first in greater estimation than any of the others; and there were many celebrated Platonists under the Roman emperors down to Julian the apostate, who was himself one of them. The first Christian doctors likewise declared for this philosophy, as Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, Origen, &c. But at length the philosophy of Aristotle, perhaps of all others the most absurd, took the lead; and truth was no longer sought for but in the writings of that philosopher. This violent fondness for his reveries began about the 12th century; at which time a philosophy was formed, that is commonly called the scholastic, and which is borrowed in great part from the writings of the Arabs, whom the scholastics, who were all attached to Aristotle, imitated in their subtle, ambiguous, abstract, and capricious manner of reasoning, by which they never hit the truth, but constantly went on one side, or beyond the mark. Toward the end of the 14th century, their spirits were extravagantly heated by logical distinctions, relative to that furious emulation, which was formed on the doctrine of Aristotle, between the Nominalists and Realists. The former had, for their chief, Ocham, an English cordelier, and a disciple of Scotus. They maintained, that the universal natures were nothing but words: and the others, who supported themselves by the authority of Scotus, maintained, that the same universal natures were beings strictly real. Philosophy. These disputes divided all the universities of Europe: philosophy was no longer employed but in operations of the intellect, conceptions, abstractions, and such like vain subtleties; and became a mere jargon, a confused heap of unintelligible ideas.

At length, in the 16th century, philosophy began to deliver itself from the chains of terminology; men accustomed themselves to philosophize by reason, and not by verbal contention: they began to throw off the yoke, and, without entirely despising Aristotle, they no longer believed him on his word. Nicholas Copernicus, who was born at Thorn, in 1473, and died in 1543, had already borne the torch of reason in the mathematics and astronomy: he had rejected the system of the world that was invented by Ptolemy, and which the Greeks called most wise and most divine; and had published his book De motu et usu orbium coelestium, and his treatise De revolutionibus, in which he established his system of the sun's being immovable, and of the motion of the earth. Galileo, who was born at Florence in 1564, adopted the system of Copernicus, confirmed it, and improved it by new observations. This discovery of the truth cost him five or six years confinement in the prison of the inquisition. He introduced a new and excellent method of reasoning in philosophical subjects.

Peter Gassendi, professor of mathematics in Paris, also practised, in the beginning of the 17th century, a new method of philosophizing, which contributed greatly to the progress of that science. Lastly, René Descartes appeared almost at the same time; and, by a method that had been but very imperfectly understood before, discovered more truths in philosophy than all the preceding ages had produced; although, from that weakness which is natural to the human understanding, he has frequently mixed error with truth in his different systems. He treated on almost all the parts of philosophy, especially the mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. Every one is acquainted with his famous system of the plenum and vortices.

Before Descartes, Francis Bacon, baron of Verulam, chancellor of England, had exposed the errors of the philosophy of the schools, and the wretched method that was there pursued. He was one of the greatest men that has ever appeared upon the earth. It was he who lighted that torch with which all his successors have illuminated philosophy; and in his writings are to be found the seeds of every new discovery, and of every new hypothesis.

After this golden Aurora, the philosophic horizon was at once enlightened by two grand luminaries, which dispersed many of those clouds that hid the truth from mortal eyes, and diffused great lights, at last, on many objects that lay buried in obscurity. See the articles Newton, Newtonian Philosophy, and Locke.

From the slight draught here given of the history of philosophy, we may draw the following consequences:

1. That philosophers, in their researches concerning the causes of all things, have found themselves obliged to reduce ratiocination into a system; to confine it to certain rules, and form it into an art, which they have called Logic.

2. That by endeavouring to explain to mankind the nature, the causes, and effects of hap- happiness, the investigation of these objects has produced a science that is called Morality, to which are connected the doctrines of natural theology, the law of nature, ethics, politics, &c. 3. That from their endeavours to investigate the nature of those sensible and palpable objects which surrounds us, has resulted a science that is called Physics, or Natural Philosophy; which in like manner consists of several branches, that all concur to its perfection, such as Optics, Chemistry, Hydraulics, Mechanics, and their dependent arts; with many others. 4. That by advancing still further, and by endeavouring to comprehend the nature and properties of subjects that are not discernible by the senses, but whose existence is the result of speculation and of a train of reasoning, a science has arisen that is called Metaphysics; which has also many branches, as ontology, psychology, cosmology, pneumatology, &c. 5. That from a desire to know the extension, the figures, the measures of all bodies, and their distances from each other, &c. they must necessarily have recourse to calculation; from whence result the mathematical sciences, whose principal branches are Arithmetic, Geometry, Algebra, Astronomy, &c.

The essence of philosophy in general consists in the investigation of the causes of all things; and the grand principle of this inquiry consists in that fundamental maxim, that no effect is produced without a cause; that nothing is done without a sufficient reason. This system of the sufficient reason is, therefore, the basis of all philosophy, and without it nothing is philosophical. To consider the outside of things, is to know them historically; to resolve them, in order to know their principles and their causes, is to learn to know them philosophically; and in this manner even history may be philosophically studied. This admirable system of the sufficient reason, by diffusing the spirit of philosophy in the world, has already purged it of numberless dangerous superstitions: the fables of magicians, sorcerers, spectres, ghosts, the absolute sympathy, and a thousand like reveries, have disappeared from among men of sense, to the very great advantage of the human race.

Philosophy may be again divided into speculative, which includes the subjects of metaphysics, morality, &c. and demonstrative or experimental, which principally regards physics; seeing that, by the improvement of the human mind by ingenious observations and the assistance of numberless admirable instruments, modern philosophers have discovered the means of explaining the principal phenomena of nature by experiments, and of demonstrating their hypotheses to the sight and to the touch, which afford proofs much more evident than those of our ancestors, which were drawn merely from logical inferences.

Natural Philosophy. See Physics.

Experimental Philosophy. See Experimental Philosophy.

Moral Philosophy. See Morals.

Philostorgius, an ecclesiastical historian of the 4th century, was born in Cappadocia, and wrote an abridgment of ecclesiastical history, in which he treats Athanasius with some severity. This work contains many curious and interesting particulars. The best edition is that of Henry de Valois in Greek and Latin. There is also attributed to him a book against Porphyry.