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What Is Philosophy?
It was the custom among Chinese, Indian, and Persian sacred writers to preface their writing by an introductory invocation, so this author does the same. He entrusts this new enterprise to divine guidance, to the loftier inspiration of his Masters during his own apprenticeship to Truth, and pays his due debt of acknowledgment to them. May they deign to guide his pen, and accept these pages as part of his silent recompense for the help and hope he received from them, which he now ventures to pass on in his turn.§We may begin by asking what this philosophy offers us. It offers those who pursue it to the end a deep understanding of the world and a satisfying explanation of the significance of human experience. It offers them the power to penetrate appearances and to discover the genuinely real from the mere appearance of reality; it offers satisfaction of that desire which everyone, everywhere, holds somewhere in his heart--the desire to be free.