Although Western thought does, in principle, approach the problem of world-view without any presuppositions, it has not been able to keep itself entirely from being influenced by religious world-views. From Christianity it has received impulses of a decisive character, and the attempt to convert the naïve-ethical world-view of Jesus into a philosophical one has cost it more attention and effort than it admits to itself. With Schopenhauer and his successors the pessimistic monism of India finds expression, and it enriches their reflexion upon the nature of the ethical. Thus the energies of all the great world-views stream into Western thought, and through the co-operation of these varied forms of thought and energy the latter is enabled to exalt into a universal conviction the optimistic-ethical world-view which hovers before its mind, and that too in a strength which it has never displayed in any previous age or in any other part of the world. And that is why Western thought has advanced farthest both in inward civilization and in outward. [pg 031] To give a real foundation to the optimistic-ethical world-view Western thought is indeed as little able as any of the world-religions were, and because the West experiences the problem of world-view in its most universal and most pressing form it is the scene of the greatest advances made by the civilized mind, but also of its greatest catastrophes. It experiences portentous changes in its world-view, and is familiar, too, with terrible periods when it has no world-view at all. It is because our Western thought is so sensitive in both these directions, that it reveals most clearly the questions and difficulties amid which the search for an optimistic world-view moves. How far does the history of our thought give to us Westerners the explanation of our fate? What road does it indicate to us as the best for our future search after a world-view in which the individual can find inwardness and strength, and mankind progress and peace? [pg 032] CHAPTER V CIVILIZATION AND ETHICS IN THE GRÆCO-ROMAN PHILOSOPHY The beginnings: Socrates. IN the seventh century before Christ the Greek spirit begins to free itself from the world-view which underlay the traditional religion, and undertakes the task of establishing another on a foundation of knowledge and thought. First there comes a nature-philosophy, the result of investigation of Being with reflexion upon what it really is. Then criticism begins its work. Belief in the gods is found unsatisfying, not only because the course of nature is not made intelligible by the rule of dwellers in Olympus, but also because these personalities no longer answer to the demands of feeling which is thoughtful and moral. These two elements, nature-philosophy and criticism, are found united in Xenophanes and Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C.