GREEK PHILOSOPHY FOR BEGINNERS.*
TIIOUGH philosophy is difficult by nature and cannot be made easy while it remains philosophy, a beginner may claim to be led to it by an easy road and to be spared till trained the difficulties which only training can remove. The first test, then, of an introduction to philosophy must be the teat of simplicity. Mr. Appleton's book comes well out of that test. It is written for Sixth Form boys and Undergraduates, and Mr. Appleton being himself a Sixth Form master knows exactly how to speak to such an audience. He is admirably clear and simple, but he sees that philosophy for the untrained does not mean philosophy for the stupid and he does not so simplify his subject that it ceases to be philosophy. Re tells you how Tholes thought that everything was water, and Anaximenes that everything was air, but he does not stop there. He explains the true philosophic import of these theories, what their authors were really striving for and what effect they had on the development of human thought. He is not content with describing the work of those brilliant and per- plexing people, the Sophists of the fifth and fourth centuries. He shows you what the Sophistic movement stood for as a whole, and how these men did what they did because in their day the human mind had suddenly come to realize the relative nature of all judgments and the subjective, element in all perception. Further, Mr. Appleton does not forget that his readers will one day be not only philosophers but scholars. He is careful to give the technical terms in Greek as well as in English and, in the case of Aristotle particularly, to use the words of the original wherever he can. For an exact understanding of Aristotle's terminology amounts very nearly to an exact understanding of Aristotle's philosophy. Mr. Appleton's account of Aristotle, though it is less than forty pages long, omits wonderfully little, and is quite the best thing in the book. His account of Plato is perhaps rather less successful. There is a disproportionately long description of the dramatic setting of the " Republic," and the section on the Ideas is neither complete nor very clear. But the book as a whole is the best introduction to Greek Philosophy at present available for beginners, being far fuller than the little handbooks and far more easily understood than the standard treatises. Those of us who " did Classics " in our youth cannot but wish that such a book had existed in our day, and those of us who avoided the Classics in youth but would like to become philosophers now may well be thankful for Mr. Appleton's clear picture of the great age of Greek Philosophy. For if one follows • The Elements of Greek Philosophy. By R. B. Appleton, Classical Master at the Perse School. Cambridge. London ; Methuen. Os. net.] Greek thought as it developed from 600 to 400 B.C. one is intro- duced to philosophy from the right end, and one's own mental processes are thereby made to take the course that was taken by the mind of the race when speculation first began in Europe two thousand five hundred years ago.
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