Acknowledgements And there is an important difference between knowledge and wisdom. To be wise is to possess the understanding and skill to make mature judgments about the use of human knowledge in the context of daily life. We should not try to make an argument out of everything. For, as Nietzsche told us "Life is not an argument."                                Adapted from Robert Paul Churchill   While composing this work, I found that most of my "original" ideas already existed underlined in texts that I had read, in some cases, years earlier. Hence, to be safe, I claim no credit for any such ideas. However, as my own abilities developed during the creation of this text, it may have yielded some novel insights that allowed me to connect more and explain better than others before me. This was possible because I had knowledge of their work and simply developed it further.             Like the rest of humanity, I owe considerable emancipation, and therefore appreciation and gratitude, to the many who contributed significantly to the knowledge and rational base as well as to the development of the mind. Their contributions allowed me to see my writings in concrete detail much of the time. As they appeared in history: The Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers (ca. 580-ca. 370 BCE) who were the first to turn from mythological accounts of the world to natural explanations, thus, started science. They were men like Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucipus, and Democritus. The ancient Athenian philosophers (ca. 490-ca. 322)such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Callicles, Critias Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. With Socrates philosophy turned inward becoming concerned with the mind's rationality and ethical reasoning. Through Plato we learned of Socrates who did not leave any writings. And Aristotle continued the tradition of the study of nature, reasoning, and ethics. The Hellenistic philosophers (341 BCE-180 CE) who gave us Epicureanism and Stoicism. Epicurus, Lucretius, Zeno of Cyprus, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, "the last good emperor." The British empiricist philosophers (1588-1776) Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume who was probably modern philosophy's foremost thinker and contributor. The Enlightenment philosophers (17th- to 19th- century) mainly French, English, and American thinkers who emphasized humanitarian political goals and social progress through a reliance on reason and experience rather than mysticism, revelation, dogma, customs, and tradition. The German philosophers (1749-1900) Goethe, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche. Each of whom made considerable contributions to the development of the mind. Moreover, they all promoted the idea that "We must see the self in terms of its long-term development and becoming during the course of a person’s life." Hence, "an individual's personality is his or her deeds, that is, a history of the deeds gives us the essence of what a person is all about." Although appearing later, Walter A. Kaufmann (1921-80) continued their work and added new insights in his many writings. As acknowledged elsewhere, I owe considerable enlightenment and guidance to him. Charles Darwin (1809-82) and the many who developed his findings further. Among them Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) and more recently Ernst Mayr, E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Nicholas K. Humphrey (their dates are noted in the text). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, et al (1818-present) who advanced the idea that if society is run with knowledge from the sciences, it will eventually eliminate the conflict between the classes by establishing universal freedom and well-being. They, and in particular Marx, emphasized "the union between theory and practice," for "philosophical theories are in peril if they are constructed in disregard of the nature of the empirical world to which they are supposed to apply." They and other sociologists described various models of society and different actual societies so that their workings right or wrong, good or bad may be understood. Here I would include the social reformer Noam Chomsky (b.1928), and the social historian Howard Zinn (b.1922). Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) accepted the German philosophers' above noted dictum that we are what we do, but credited us not only with our achievements but also with our failures or blunders. He advanced the idea that human behavior is the result of both heredity and environment. He established a plausible model of the mind which included the working terminology of the id, the ego, and the superego, as well as the unconscious. He expounded his findings in books that are very readable. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) best known as a physicist but who also was a serious philosopher. I learned much from his writings on social, economical, ethical, and religious matters. Also, the many who popularized the physical world. People such as Carl Sagan (1934-96), Jacob Bronowski (1908-74), and Isaac Asimov (1920-92). The philosophers of logical empiricism (1845-1993): W. K. Clifford, Bertrand Russell, Joseph McCabe, Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, and Hector Hawton who expounds the humanist tradition. Some of them known as logical positivists were wrong when they thought that rational objective criteria could not be applied to emotional and ethical questions. Abraham Kaplan's In Pursuit of Wisdom (1977) helped me making it through graduate school. The American humanistic philosophers of pragmatic naturalism (1833-present) whose efforts culminated in a democratic, modern, and humane philosophy as expounded in the writings on secular humanism. Robert Greene Ingersoll, John Dewey, Sidney Hook, Corliss Lamont, Ben F. Kimpel, James Rachels, Brad Blanchard, Paul Kurtz, and many others. Lamont's The Philosophy of Humanism is a most readable text and was my introduction to this way of seeing the world in 1986.