Philosophy, the science of sciences or of things in general, properly an attempt to find the absolute in the contingent, the immutable in the mutable, the universal in the particular, the eternal in the temporal, the real in the phenomenal, the ideal in the real, or in other words, to discover “the single principle that,” as Dr. Stirling says, “possesses within itself the capability of transition into all existent variety and varieties,” which it presupposes can be done not by induction from the transient, but by deduction from the permanent as that spiritually reveals itself in the creating mind, so that a Philosopher is a man who has, as Carlyle says, quoting Goethe, “stationed himself in the middle (between the outer and the inner, the upper and the lower), to whom the Highest has descended and the Lowest mounted up, who is the equal and kindly brother of all.” “Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of the inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not; whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort; may still linger in the forecourt till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.” Indeed philosophy is more than science (q.v.); it is a divine wisdom instilled into and inspiring a thinker's life. See Thinker, The.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Philosophism, French * Philoxenus