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PHILOSOPHY AS POWER
even to believers who are uninitiated into the innermost circles of the adept.
In the West, on the other hand, the pride of philosophy is that it is open to the understanding and criticism of all. Our thought is exoteric, and that is regarded as one of the signs and proofs of its universal validity. Western philosophy has no secret doctrine, but challenges all to scrutinize her arguments, demanding no more than intelligence and an open-minded fairness in discussion. By this general appeal she has won her ascendency over the wisdom and teaching of the Church--which required that certain things should be taken for granted as once and for all established by divine revelation, and unquestionably settled by the interpretations of the inspired fathers, popes, and councils. Our popular modern philosophy, sailing in the broad wake of the natural sciences, recognizes no other authority than proof by experiment and pretends to rest upon no other assumptions than those rationally drawn as the logical theoretical result of critically and methodically digested data derived through sense-experience, registered and controlled by the mind and the faultless apparatus of the laboratories.
I wonder to what extent we feel in our civilization that the man who takes up the profession of the philosopher becomes mysteriously powerful. The business people controlling our economics, social life, internal politics, and foreign affairs generally feel suspicious of philosophers. Absorbed with lofty notions not easily applicable to current emergencies, the "professors" tend only to complicate issues with their abstract approach-and besides, they are not conspicuously fortunate themselves as breadwinners or practical managers. Plato, we know, once tried his hand at government. He attempted to assist a tyrant of Sicily who had invited him to come and establish a model government along the highest philosophic lines. But the two soon quarreled, and the tyrant ended by arresting the philosopher, offering him for sale in the slave-market of the very capital that was to have
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