Download and Read From Religion to Philosophy PDF ByFrancis MacDonald Cornford Total Download 25 “I cannot live without books.” –Thomas Jefferson Synopsis Conford traces the remarkable burst of abstract speculation among pre-Socratic thinkers of the sixth century B.C. from the religious thought of the preceding era in Greece. Combining deep classical scholarship with anthropological and sociological insights, he examines the mythic precursors of enduring metaphysical concepts such as destiny, God, the soul, substance, nature, and immortality. His original and engaging explorations profile the rise of a new spirit of rational inquiry from traditional beliefs, demonstrating that philosophy's modes of clear definition and explicit statement were already implicit in the unreasoned intuitions of mythology.