While still a student I was surprised to find the history of thought always written merely as a history of philosophical systems, never as the history of man’s effort to arrive at a world-view. Later, when reflecting on the current of civilization in which I found myself living, I was struck by the strange and inexorable connexions which exist between civilization and our view of the world as a whole. Next I felt a still stronger compulsion to put to Western thought the question what it has been aiming at, and what result it has reached in the matter of world-view. What is there left of the achievements of our philosophy when it is stripped of its tinsel of learning? What has it to offer us …
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