Excerpt from A History of the Problems of Philosophy, Vol. 1 These characteristics are conspicuous in our bearing towards the History of philosophy, as well as other universal undertakings. We can boast of no serious attempt at presenting in rational order the great systems of philosophy, which are the successive exponents of the main stages of Western civilization. We have written text-books for students, and some very competent and illuminating monographs on individual thinkers. But there has been no attempt at the effective co - ordination of these, nor have we sought to give effect to the conviction that philosophy is, in truth, a continuous endeavour, and the reflection of a continuous experience. And yet one has to go but a little way in philosophy to realize that its great systems can be interpreted only in their context, and its problems effectively handled only through their history. We have to go back to the past not merely because here, as elsewhere, we require the help of earlier thinkers so as to start from their results, but because philosophy must reflect life. It is the exposition of experience. It is experience itself breaking out into explicitness, blossoming into clear consciousness, comprehending itself - at least to some extent. And experience always garners its past into its present: what it is can be discovered only by laying out what it has been, by following the steps of its self-articulating, self-concreting process. Both on account of the bearing of philosophy upon life, and of the history of philosophy upon philosophy itself, one may say that a competent account of its great systems is the most urgent desideratum of English reflective thought at the present time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.