The World's Debt to the Catholic Church

Philosophy, a term which comes to us from the Greek and means by etymology love of wisdom, was originally employed according to tradition by Pythagoras, who preferred to call himself a lover of wisdom, though the term _sophos_ meaning _wise_ was very common for a scholar at that time. Philosophy is above all the occupation of the mind with the great truths around us, the nature of things as they are, the meaning of existence as far as we can penetrate it, the place of humanity and its relation to the universe, as well as the consideration of the freedom of man and the sense of beauty and the sense of duty of which he enjoys the possession. Philosophy came to mean the body of highest truth so far as men had reached it at any given time. It represented the organized sum of human knowledge as exemplified in the great principles which men had deduced from their study of things as they are and therefore the science of which all other modes of knowledge are branches, since it concerns the most fundamental matters which lie behind and beyond all the other knowledge that men possess.

Philosophy is above all the science of things as we know them in their causes or the science of sufficient reasons for things in so far as we have been able to find them out. Its greatest maxim is undoubtedly the truism "Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers." It is comparatively easy to know a great many things, to possess an immense body of information and yet to understand very little of it and perhaps to be quite incapable of applying it to the most important affairs of life.