subjects discussed in these are Utility, Communism, the Kantian and
Hegelian philosophies, Psychology, and the Origin of Language. (There have
been added also in the Third Edition remarks on other subjects. A list of
the most important of these additions is given at the end of this Preface.)

Ancient and modern philosophy throw a light upon one another: but they
should be compared, not confounded. Although the connexion between them is
sometimes accidental, it is often real. The same questions are discussed
by them under different conditions of language and civilization; but in
some cases a mere word has survived, while nothing or hardly anything of
the pre-Socratic, Platonic, or Aristotelian meaning is retained. There are
other questions familiar to the moderns, which have no place in ancient
philosophy. The world has grown older in two thousand years, and has
enlarged its stock of ideas and methods of reasoning. Yet the germ of
modern thought is found in ancient, and we may claim to have inherited,
notwithstanding many accidents of time and place, the spirit of Greek
philosophy. There is, however, no continuous growth of the one into the
other, but a new beginning, partly artificial, partly arising out of the
questionings of the mind itself, and also receiving a stimulus from the
study of ancient writings.

Considering the great and fundamental differences which exist in ancient
and modern philosophy, it seems best that we should at first study them
separately, and seek for the interpretation of either, especially of the
ancient, from itself only, comparing the same author with himself and with
his contemporaries, and with the general state of thought and feeling
prevalent in his age. Afterwards comes the remoter light which they cast
on one another. We begin to feel that the ancients had the same thoughts
as ourselves, the same difficulties which characterize all periods of
transition, almost the same opposition between science and religion.