The sound of the first human step in recorded history, the prelude to the
entrance of the producer on the historical scene, was the birth of philosophy
in ancient Greece. All earlier cultures had been ruled, not by reason, but by
mysticism: the task of philosophy—the formulation of an integrated view of
man, of existence, of the universe—was the monopoly of various religions that
enforced their views by the authority of a claim to supernatural knowledge and
dictated the rules that controlled men’s lives. Philosophy was born in a
period when . . . a comparative degree of political freedom undercut the power
of mysticism and, for the first time, man was free to face an unobstructed
universe, free to declare that his mind was competent to deal with all the
problems of his existence and that reason was his only means of knowledge.