he can only teach us the activity or art of thinking which will enable us for ourselves to analyse or discover the meaning of all questions. And then we shall see that the so-called philosophical problems are either meaningless combinations of symbols, or can be interpreted as perfectly sound questions. But in the latter case they have ceased to be philosophical and must be handed over to the scientist who will try to answer them by his methods of observation and experiment.
Kant, who in spite of his complicated philosophy had many bright moments of profound insight, has said that he could teach philosophizing, but not philosophy. That was a very wise statement, and it implies that philosophy is nothing but an art or activity, that there are no philosophical propositions, and consequently no system of philosophy (another great thinker who seems to have been well aware of the nature and place of philosophy was Leibniz. When he founded the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin and sketched out the plans for its constitution, he assigned a place in it to all the sciences, but philosophy was not one of them. He must have felt somehow that it could not be regarded as the pursuit of a particular kind of truth, but that the determination of meaning must pervade every search for truth).
When we look for the most typical example of a philosophical mind we must direct our eyes towards Socrates. All the efforts of his acute mind and his fervent heart were devoted to the pursuit of meaning. He tried all his life to discover what it really was that men had in their minds when they discussed about virtue and the Good, about Justice and Piety; and his famous irony consisted in showing his disciples that even in their strongest assertions they did not know what they were talking about and that in their most ardent beliefs they hardly knew what they were believing.
As long as people speak and write so much more than they think, using their words in a mechanical conventional manner, disagreeing about the Good (in ethics) the Beautiful (in Aesthetics) and the Useful (in Economies and Politics), we shall stand in great need of men with Socratic minds in all our human pursuits. And since also in science the great discoveries are made only by those superior minds who in the routine of their experimental and theoretical research keep wondering what it is all about and therefore remain engaged in the pursuit of meaning, the philosophical attitude will be recognised more than ever as the most powerful force and the best part of scientific attitude.
