Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IDEAS AND IDEALS. 21 separate elements, we are in general only multiplying our problems. An analysis of meaning or explanation, on the other hand, simplifies our problem, by leading us to broader principles under which a number of particular cases may be brought; and such a method may at last lead us to that which explains itself and carries us no farther. It is, at any rate, on the possibility of reaching such a self-explanatory system of principles, in which the wheel of our investigations may " come full circle," that the hopes of philosophy rest. Further, it is not difficult to see how such a method of explanation connects itself with the idea of an end: since a deeper insight into the meaning of being and knowledge—i.e., into the principles by which their nature is determined—can hardly fail to give rise to a demand for a fuller expression of that meaning than we can find in being and knowledge as they are actually presented to us. To discover what an object means is usually to discover that it does not mean it with perfect clearness; and thus to gain ideas of the principles by which objects are determined is at the same time to gain ideals of their further determination. On this point, however, we need not now insist. It is sufficient for our present purpose to have indicated the steps by which we are led to the conviction that philosophy is concerned with the analysis of the principles involved in knowledge and being, and, by means of that analysis, with the consideration of an end or ideal. But if philosophy is thus to appropriate the second and fourth of our methods of explanation, the question remains how it is to relate itself to the first and third. The consideration of this question may help us to understand the relation of philosophy to the various particula...