We "direct" the attention; we speak of "apprehension," of "conception," of "intuition." Our knowledge is "clear" or "obscure"; an oration is "brilliant"; an emotion is "sweet" or "bitter." What wonder that, as we read over the fragments that have come down to us from the Pre-Socratic philosophers, we should be struck by the fact that they sometimes leave out altogether and sometimes touch lightly upon a number of those things that we regard to-day as peculiarly within the province of the philosopher.

They busied themselves with the world as they saw it, and certain things had hardly as yet come definitely within their horizon.
2.

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY AT ITS HEIGHT .-- The next succeeding period sees certain classes of questions emerge into prominence which had attracted comparatively little attention from the men of an earlier day.
Democritus of Abdera, to whom reference has been made above, belongs chronologically to this latter period, but his way of thinking makes us class him with the earlier philosophers.

It was characteristic of these latter that they assumed rather naively that man can look upon the world and can know it, and can by thinking about it succeed in giving a reasonable account of it.

That there may be a difference between the world as it really is and the world as it appears to man, and that it may be impossible for man to attain to a knowledge of the absolute truth of things, does not seem to have occurred to them.
The fifth century before Christ was, in Greece, a time of intense intellectual ferment.