Note (return) — Chapter IX

We have devoted a much larger space than we originally designed to the ante-Socratic schools--quite out of proportion, indeed, with that we shall be able to appropriate to their successors. But inasmuch as all the great primary problems of thought, which are subsequently discussed by Plato and Aristotle, were started, and received, at least, typical answers in those schools, we can not hope to understand Plato, or Aristotle, or even Epicurus, or Zeno of Cittium, unless we have first mastered the doctrines of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras. 467 The attention we have bestowed on these early thinkers will, therefore, have been a valuable preparatory discipline for the study of